Top 500 Toni Morrison Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Pain was greedy; it demanded all of her attention.”

— Toni Morrison

252. “I don’t work. I keep telling people I’m unemployed. And I don’t wash dishes, and I don’t wash clothes, and I don’t clean my house. Somebody else does that.”

— Toni Morrison

253. “Women did what strawberry plants did before they shot out their thin vines: the quality of the green changed. Then the vine threads came, then the buds. By the time the white petals died and the mint-colored berry poked out, the leaf shine was gilded tight and waxy.”

— Toni Morrison

254. “The last of her children, whom she barely glanced at when he was born because it wasn’t worth the trouble to try to learn features you would never see change into adulthood anyway.”

— Toni Morrison

255. “Being a minority in both caste and class, we moved about anyway on the hem of life, struggling to consolidate our weaknesses and hang on, or to creep singly up into the major folds of the garment.”

— Toni Morrison

256. “The disappointment he felt in his daughters sifted down on them like ash, dulling their buttery complexions and choking the lilt out of what should have been girlish voices.”

— Toni Morrison

257. “And when she stepped foot on free ground she could not believe that Halle knew what she didn’t; that Halle, who had never drawn one free breath, knew that there was nothing like it in this world. It scared her.”

— Toni Morrison

258. “God take what He would,” she said. And He did, and He did, and He did and then gave her Halle who gave her freedom when it didn’t mean a thing.”

— Toni Morrison

259. “It had been the longest time since she had had a rib-scraping laugh. She had forgotten how deep and down it could be. So different from the miscellaneous giggles and smiles she had learned to be content with these past few years.”

— Toni Morrison

260. “They had stared at her with great uncomprehending eyes. Eyes that questioned nothing and asked everything. Unblinking and unabashed, they stared up at her. The end of the world lay in their eyes, and the beginning, and all the waste in bewteen.”

— Toni Morrison

261. “There is a difference between being put out and being put outdoors. If you are put out, you go somewhere else; if you are outdoors, there is no place to go. The distinction was subtle but final. Outdoors was the end of something, an irrevocable, physical fact, defining and complementing our metaphysical condition... Dead doesn’t change, and outdoors is here to stay.”

— Toni Morrison

262. “It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves.”

— Toni Morrison

263. “To be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing.”

— Toni Morrison

264. “Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this mission.”

— Toni Morrison

265. “Anything is better than the silence when she answered to hands gesturing and was indifferent to the movement of lips. When she saw every little thing and colors leaped smoldering into view. She will forgo the most violent of sunsets, stars as fat as dinner plates and all the blood of autumn and settle for the palest yellow if it comes from her Beloved.”

— Toni Morrison

266. “For a nickel a month, Lady Jones did what whitepeople thought unnecessary if not illegal: crowded her little parlor with the colored children who had time for and interest in book learning.”

— Toni Morrison

267. “And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life.”

— Toni Morrison

268. “And then she knew. Her friends and neighbors were angry at her because she had overstepped, given too much, offended them by excess.”

— Toni Morrison

269. “She had been looking all along for a friend, and it took her a while to discover that a lover was not a comrade and could never be – for a woman.”

— Toni Morrison

270. “The sun and the moon shared the horizon in a distant friendship, each unfazed by the other.”

— Toni Morrison

271. “They did not believe death was accidental – life might be, but death was deliberate.”

— Toni Morrison

272. “Well, you not the first by a long shot. An integrated army is integrated misery. You all go fight, come back, they treat you like dogs. Change that. They treat dogs better.”

— Toni Morrison

273. “She seemed to fold into herself, like a pleated wing. Her pain antagonized me. I wanted to open her up, crisp her edges, ram a stick down that hunched and curving spine, force her to stand erect and spit the misery out on the streets. But she held it in where it could lap up into her eyes.”

— Toni Morrison

274. “Solitude, competitiveness and grief are the unavoidable lot of a writer only when there is no organization or network to which he can turn.”

— Toni Morrison

275. “Her color is a cross she will always carry.”

— Toni Morrison

276. “From the beginning, his mother and Pilate had fought for his life, and he had never so much as made either of them a cup of tea.”

— Toni Morrison

277. “Beginning Beloved with numerals rather than spelled out numbers, it was my intention to give the house an identity separate from the street or even the city.”

— Toni Morrison

278. “I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me.”

— Toni Morrison

279. “The threads of malice creeping toward him from Beloved’s side of the table were held harmless in the warmth of Sethe’s smile.”

— Toni Morrison

280. “They will blow it, she thought. Each will cling to a sad little story of hurt and sorrow – some long-ago trouble and pain life dumped on their pure and innocent selves. And each one will rewrite that story forever, knowing the plot, guessing the theme, inventing its meaning and dismissing its origin.”

— Toni Morrison

281. “The danger of sympathizing with the stranger is the possibility of becoming a stranger. To lose one’s racial-ized rank is to lose one’s own valued and enshrined difference.”

— Toni Morrison

282. “I’m just trying to look at something without blinking, to see what it is like, or it could have been like, and how that had something to do with the way we live now. Novels are always inquiries for me.”

— Toni Morrison

283. “There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship’s, smooths and contains the rocker. It’s an inside kind – wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one’s own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.”

— Toni Morrison

284. “It was lovely. Not to be stared at, not seen, but being pulled into view by the interested, uncritical eyes of the other.”

— Toni Morrison

285. “Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name. Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don’t know her name?”

— Toni Morrison

286. “Schools must stop being holding pens to keep energetic young people off the job market and off the streets. We stretch puberty out a long, long time.”

— Toni Morrison

287. “To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay.”

— Toni Morrison

288. “There is honey in this land sweeter than any I know of, and I have cut cane in places where the dirt itself tasted like sugar, so that’s saying a heap.”

— Toni Morrison

289. “Now they will rest before shouldering the endless work they were created to do down here in paradise.”

— Toni Morrison

290. “Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another – physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap.”

— Toni Morrison

291. “The habit of getting up early, which I had formed when the children were young, now became my choice. I am not very bright or very witty or very inventive after the sun goes down.”

— Toni Morrison

292. “I wonder if the person he wants to marry is me or a black girl? And if it isn’t me he wants, but any black girl who looks like me, talks and acts like me, what will happen when he finds out that I hate ear hoops, that I don’t have to straighten my hair, that Mingus puts me to sleep, that sometimes I want to get out of my skin and be only the person inside – not American – not black – just me?”

— Toni Morrison

293. “What kind of love is it that requires an angel and only an angel for its commitment?”

— Toni Morrison

294. “You are my face; I am you. Why did you leave me who am you? I will never leave you again Don’t ever leave me again You will never leave me again You went in the water I drank your blood I brought your milk You forgot to smile I loved you You hurt me You came back to me You left me I waited for you.”

— Toni Morrison

295. “When fear rules, obedience is the only survival choice.”

— Toni Morrison

296. “All that time, all that time, I thought I was missing Jude.” And the loss pressed down on her chest and came up into her throat. “We was girls together,” she said as though explaining something. “O Lord, Sula,” she cried, “girl, girl, girlgirlgirl.” It was a fine cry – loud and long – but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.”

— Toni Morrison

297. “In the safe harbor of each other’s company they could afford to abandon the ways of other people and concentrate on their own perceptions of things.”

— Toni Morrison

298. “We will be judged by how well we love.”

— Toni Morrison

299. “American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen.”

— Toni Morrison

300. “What I’m doing ain’t about hating White people. It’s about loving us.”

— Toni Morrison