Top 500 Toni Morrison Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

259. “Pain was greedy; it demanded all of her attention.”

— Toni Morrison

260. “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

261. “Like friendship, hatred needed more than physical intimacy; it wanted creativity and hard work to sustain itself.”

— Toni Morrison

262. “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

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

— Toni Morrison

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

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

— Toni Morrison

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

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

— Toni Morrison

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

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

— 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 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

280. “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

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

— Toni Morrison

282. “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

283. “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

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

— 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. “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

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

290. “Black women were armed, black women were dangerous and the less money they had the deadlier the weapon they chose.”

— Toni Morrison

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

— Toni Morrison

292. “Like Guitar in Son of Solomon, and Son in Tar Baby, he believed that harmony could never exist between the races.”

— Toni Morrison

293. “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

294. “You can’t own a human being. You can’t lose what you don’t own. Suppose you did own him. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that? Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door? You don’t, do you? And neither does he. You’re turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can’t value you more than you value yourself.”

— Toni Morrison

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

— Toni Morrison

296. “My father saw two black men lynched on his street in Cartersville, as a child. And I think seeing two black businessmen – not vagrants – hanging from trees as a child was traumatic for him.”

— Toni Morrison

297. “Men who knew their manhood lay in their guns and were not even embarrassed by the knowledge that without gunshot fox would laugh at them.”

— Toni Morrison

298. “I’ll explain to her, even though I don’t have to. Why I did it. How if I hadn’t killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her.”

— Toni Morrison

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

— Toni Morrison

300. “More than fear of loving bears or birds bigger than cows, I fear pathless nights. How, I wonder, can I find you in the dark?”

— Toni Morrison