Top 500 Toni Morrison Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “I don’t think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they’re black or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money. That’s what we’re upset about.”

— Toni Morrison

302. “I don’t want to be free of you because I am alive only with you.”

— Toni Morrison

303. “It would be ten years before they saw each other again, and their meeting would be thick with birds.”

— Toni Morrison

304. “They were solitary little girls whose loneliness was so profound it intoxicated them and sent them stumbling into Technicolored visions that always included a presence, a someone, who, quite like the dreamer, shared the delight of the dream.”

— Toni Morrison

305. “Every now and then she looked around for tangible evidence of his having ever been there. Where were the butterflies? the blueberries? the whistling reed? She could find nothing, for he had left nothing but his stunning absence.”

— Toni Morrison

306. “The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you’d have a little love left over for the next one.”

— Toni Morrison

307. “Violet learned then what she had forgotten until this moment: that laughter is serious. More complicated, more serious than tears.”

— Toni Morrison

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

— Toni Morrison

309. “Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel, that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights, or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination.”

— Toni Morrison

310. “If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem.”

— Toni Morrison

311. “It’s been mentioned or suggested that Paradise will not be well studied, because it’s about this unimportant intellectual topic, which is religion.”

— Toni Morrison

312. “What’s fair ain’t necessarily right.”

— Toni Morrison

313. “So this is what insanity is. Not goofy behavior, but watching a sudden change in the world you used to know.”

— Toni Morrison

314. “It was my father who could do no wrong. So I didn’t think of it as, oh, look, my father’s a violent man.”

— Toni Morrison

315. “Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?”

— Toni Morrison

316. “Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live.”

— Toni Morrison

317. “I want to do good work. I want to be involved in other people’s doing good work.”

— Toni Morrison

318. “A lot of black people believe that Jews in this country have become white. They behave like white people rather than Jewish people.”

— Toni Morrison

319. “Things got better but I still had to be careful. Very careful in how I raised her. I had to be strict, very strict. Lula Ann needed to learn how to behave, how to keep her head down and not to make trouble. I don’t care how many times she changes her name. Her color is a cross she will always carry. But it’s not my fault. It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault. It’s not. Bride I’m scared.”

— Toni Morrison

320. “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

321. “He wants to put his story next to hers.”

— Toni Morrison

322. “We know you can never do it properly – once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul.”

— Toni Morrison

323. “Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.”

— Toni Morrison

324. “The sad thing was that Pauline did not really care for clothes and makeup. She merely wanted other women to cast favorable glances her way.”

— Toni Morrison

325. “I’m not entangled in shaping my work according to other people’s views of how I should have done it.”

— Toni Morrison

326. “I don’t think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It’s perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man.”

— Toni Morrison

327. “But stars can explode, disappear. Besides, what we see when we look at them may no longer be there. Some could have died thousands of years ago and we’re just now getting their light. Old information looking like news.”

— Toni Morrison

328. “We were two throats and one eye and we had no price.”

— Toni Morrison

329. “They were not holding hands, but their shadows were.”

— Toni Morrison

330. “She was one of the few things abhorrent to him that he could touch and therefore hurt. He poured out on her the sum of all his inarticulate fury and aborted desires. Hating her, he could leave himself intact.”

— Toni Morrison

331. “She cannot be lost because no one is looking for her.”

— Toni Morrison

332. “I started out believing that life was made just so the world would have some way to think about itself, but that it had gone awry with humans because flesh, pinioned by misery, hangs on to it with pleasure.”

— Toni Morrison

333. “Good for you. More it hurt more better it is. Can’t nothing heal without pain, you know.”

— Toni Morrison

334. “I was so sure it would happen. That the past was an abused record with no choice but to repeat itself at the crack and no power on earth could lift the arm that held the needle.”

— Toni Morrison

335. “These and other inanimate things she saw and experienced. They were real to her. She knew them. They were the codes and touchstones of the world, capable of translation and possession. She owned the crack that made her stumble; she owned the clumps of dandelions whose white heads, last fall, she had blown away; whose yellow heads, this fall, she peered into. And owning them made her part of the world, and the world a part of her.”

— Toni Morrison

336. “The best part of all, the absolutely most delicious part, is finishing it and then doing it over I rewrite a lot, over and over again, so that it looks like I never did.”

— Toni Morrison

337. “You know, the kind who know Jesus by His first name, but out of politeness never use it even to His face.”

— Toni Morrison

338. “Nothing could be taken for granted. Women who loved you tried to cut your throat, while women who didn’t even know your name scrubbed your back. Witches could sound like Katharine Hepburn and your best friend could try to strangle you. Smack in the middle of an orchid there might be a blob of jello and inside a Mickey Mouse doll, a fixed and radiant star.”

— Toni Morrison

339. “Bryn Mawr had done what a four-year dose of liberal education was designed to do: unfit her for eighty percent of the useful work of the world.”

— Toni Morrison

340. “My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren’t my children.”

— Toni Morrison

341. “You don’t have to love me but you damn well have to respect me.”

— Toni Morrison

342. “Homelessness has been recharacterized as streetlessness. Not the poor deprived of homes, but the homed being deprived of their streets.”

— Toni Morrison

343. “It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too.”

— Toni Morrison

344. “The body is ready to have babies. Nature wants it done then, when the body can handle it, not after 40, when the income can handle it.”

— Toni Morrison

345. “Isolation, you know, carries the seeds of its own destruction because as times change, other things seep in.”

— Toni Morrison

346. “I guess I’m depressed. I don’t know. I can’t explain it. Part of it is the irritability of being 84, and part of it is being not as physically strong as I once was. And part of it is my misunderstanding, I think, of what’s going on in the world.”

— Toni Morrison

347. “You couldn’t learn age, but adulthood was there for all.”

— Toni Morrison

348. “As in the case of many misanthropes, his disdain for people led him into a profession designed to serve them.”

— Toni Morrison

349. “Deep, deep trouble. Can’t rival the dead for love. Lose every time.”

— Toni Morrison

350. “What was taken by outsiders to be slackness, slovenliness or even generosity was in fact a full recognition of the legitimacy of forces other than good ones.”

— Toni Morrison