Top 500 Toni Morrison Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “As in the case of many misanthropes, his disdain for people led him into a profession designed to serve them.”

— Toni Morrison

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

— Toni Morrison

353. “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

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

— Toni Morrison

355. “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

356. “Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn’t get interested in leaving life or living it.”

— Toni Morrison

357. “Why not? I can be miserable if I want to. You don’t need to try and make it go away. It shouldn’t go away. Its just as sad as it ought to be and I’m not going to hide from what’s true just because it hurts.”

— Toni Morrison

358. “That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up. And though she and others lived through and got over it, she could never let it happen to her own.”

— Toni Morrison

359. “You need intelligence, and you need to look. You need a gaze, a wide gaze, penetrating and roving – thats what’s useful for art.”

— Toni Morrison

360. “Did you do it yet?” He was like a teen-age girl wondering about the virginity of her friend, the friend who has a look, a manner newly minted––different, separate, focused somehow. “Did you do it yet? Do you know something both exotic and ordinary that I have not felt? Do you now know what it’s like to risk your one and only self? How did it feel? Were you afraid? Did it change you? And if I do it, will it change me too?”

— Toni Morrison

361. “Don’t love her too much. Don’t. Maybe it’s still in her the thing that makes it all right to kill her children. I have to tell her. I have to protect her.”

— Toni Morrison

362. “A son ain’t what a woman say. A son is what a man do.”

— Toni Morrison

363. “I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can’t teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort.”

— Toni Morrison

364. “And the lives of these old black women were synthesized in their eyes- a puree of tragedy and humor, wickedness and serenity, truth and fantasy.”

— Toni Morrison

365. “She is not so afraid at night because she is the color of it.”

— Toni Morrison

366. “Hunched down in the small bright room Nel waited. Waited for the oldest cry. A scream not for others, not in sympathy for a burnt child, or a dead father, but a deeply personal cry for one’s own pain. A loud, strident: ‘Why me?’ She waited.”

— Toni Morrison

367. “Our debates, for the most part, are examples unworthy of a playground: name-calling, verbal slaps, gossip, giggles, all while the swings and slides of governance remain empty.”

— Toni Morrison

368. “The best thing she was, was her children.”

— Toni Morrison

369. “They encouraged you to put some of your weight in their hands and soon as you felt how light and lovely it was, they studied your scars and tribulations...”

— Toni Morrison

370. “You are about to find out what it takes, how the world is, how it works and how it changes when you are a parent. Good luck and God help the child.”

— Toni Morrison

371. “Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye.”

— Toni Morrison

372. “It never occurred to us that the Earth itself might have been unyielding.”

— Toni Morrison

373. “Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.”

— Toni Morrison

374. “It takes a certain intelligence to love like that – softly, without props. But the world is such a showpiece, maybe that’s why folks try to outdo it, put everything they feel onstage just to prove they can think up things too: handsome scary things like fights to the death, adultery, setting sheets afire. They fail of course. The world outdoes them every time.”

— Toni Morrison

375. “No more apologies for a bleeding heart when the opposite is no heart at all. Danger of losing our humanity must be met with more humanity. Otherwise we stand meekly behind Eris, hold Nemesis’s cloak, and genuflect at the feet of Thanatos.”

— Toni Morrison

376. “I feel like today we always glorify the young, just-plucked-from-college writer. But it’s much harder to start writing later, in middle age, struggling on a book around a full-time job and family.”

— Toni Morrison

377. “They hooted and laughed all the way back to the car, teasing Milkman, egging him on to tell more about how scared he was. And he told them. Laughing too, hard, loud, and long. Really laughing, and he found himself exhilarated by simply walking the earth. Walking it like he belonged on it; like his legs were stalks, tree trunks, a part of his body that extended down down down into the rock and soil, and were comfortable there – on the earth and on the place where he walked. And he did not limp.”

— Toni Morrison

378. “Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.”

— Toni Morrison

379. “My nature is a quiet one, anyway. As a child I was considered respectful; as a young woman I was called discreet. Later on I was thought to have the wisdom maturity brings.”

— Toni Morrison

380. “I write the way women have babies. You don’t know it’s going to be like that. If you did, there’s no way you would go through with it.”

— Toni Morrison

381. “Everything bad that ever happened to him happened because he couldn’t read.”

— Toni Morrison

382. “She left me the way people leave a hotel room. A hotel room is a place to be when you are doing something else. Of itself it is of no consequence to one’s major scheme. A hotel room is convenient. But its convenience is limited to the time you need it while you are in that particular town on that particular business; you hope it is comfortable, but prefer, rather, that it be anoymous. It is not, after all, where you live.”

— Toni Morrison

383. “At least she’s willing to figure it out, do something, risk something and take its measure. I risk nothing. I sit on a throne and identify signs of imperfection in others.”

— Toni Morrison

384. “Our past is bleak. Our future dim. But I am not reasonable. A reasonable man adjusts to his environment. And unreasonable man does not. All progress, therefore, depends on the unreasonable man. I prefer not to adjust to my environment. I refuse the prison of “I” and choose the open spaces of “we”.”

— Toni Morrison

385. “Because each had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they had set about creating something else to be.”

— Toni Morrison

386. “What you want to be when you grow up?” Thomas turned the knob with his left hand and opened the door. “A man,” he said and left.”

— Toni Morrison

387. “The isolation, the separateness, is always a part of any utopia.”

— Toni Morrison

388. “You got a life? Live it! Live the motherfuckin life!”

— Toni Morrison

389. “He fell for an eighteen-year old girl with one of those deepdown spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going.”

— Toni Morrison

390. “In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it’s nothing else but color.”

— Toni Morrison

391. “The screams of a hurt woman were indistinguishable from everyday traffic.”

— Toni Morrison

392. “I began to realize that this idea of the lighter the better and the darker the worse was really – had an impact on sororities, on friendships, on all sorts of things, and it was stunning to me.”

— Toni Morrison

393. “They held hands and knew that only the coffin would lie in the earth; the bubbly laughter and the press of fingers in the palm would stay aboveground forever. At first, as they stood there, their hands were clenched together. They relaxed slowly until during the walk back home their fingers were laced in as gentle a clasp as that of any two young girlfriends trotting up the road on a summer day wondering what happened to butterflies in the winter.”

— Toni Morrison

394. “An editor is like a priest or a psychiatrist; if you get the wrong one then you are better off alone.”

— Toni Morrison

395. “Well, if a man don’t HAVE a chance, then he has to TAKE a chance!”

— Toni Morrison

396. “Now I know why Baby Suggs pondered color her last years. She never had time to see, let alone enjoy it before.”

— Toni Morrison

397. “I sold my elegant blackness to all those childhood ghosts and now they pay me for it.”

— Toni Morrison

398. “What does ‘poor’ mean? No television?” Steve raised his eyebrows. “It means no money,” said Bride. “Same thing,” he answered. “No money, no television.” “Means no washing machine, no fridge, no bathroom, no money!” “Money get you out of that Jaguar? Money save your ass?”

— Toni Morrison

399. “Everything I’ve ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.”

— Toni Morrison

400. “Whitefolks said he was a witch doctor, but they said that so they wouldn’t have to say he was smart. A hunter’s hunter that’s what he was. Smart as they come. Taught me two lessons I lived by all my life. One was the secret of kindness from white people –they had to pity a thing before they could like it. The other – oh well, I forgot it.” Joe Trace.”

— Toni Morrison