Top 500 Toni Morrison Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “Do what you please in the City, it is there to back and frame you no matter what you do.”

— Toni Morrison

402. “We don’t need any more writers as solitary heroes. We need a heroic writer’s movement: assertive, militant, pugnacious.”

— Toni Morrison

403. “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

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

— Toni Morrison

405. “I like the way the City makes people think they can do what they want and get away with it.”

— Toni Morrison

406. “Their children were like distant but exposed wounds whose aches were no less intimate because separate from their flesh. They had looked at the world and back at their children, back at the world and back again at their children, and Sula knew that one clear young eye was all that kept the knife away from the throat’s curve.”

— Toni Morrison

407. “I have the wonderful pleasure of finishing the book and closing it. And I don’t read them later.”

— Toni Morrison

408. “Before and since, all her effort was directed not on avoiding pain but on getting through it as quickly as possible.”

— Toni Morrison

409. “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

410. “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

411. “The unflattering reviews are painful for short periods of time; the badly written ones are deeply, deeply insulting. That reviewer took no time to really read the book.”

— Toni Morrison

412. “When she awoke there was a melody in her head she could not identify or recall ever hearing before. ‘Perhaps I made it up,’ she thought. Then it came to her – the name of the song and all its lyrics just as she had heard it many times before. She sat on the edge of the bed thinking, ‘There aren’t any more new songs and I have sung all the ones there are. I have sung them all. I have sung all the songs there are.”

— Toni Morrison

413. “The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us.”

— Toni Morrison

414. “She floated near but outside her own body, feeling vague and intense at the same time. Needing nothing. Being what there was.”

— Toni Morrison

415. “He wondered if there was anyone in the world who liked him. Liked him for himself alone.”

— Toni Morrison

416. “I don’t wait to be struck by lightning and I don’t need certain slants of light in order to be able to write.”

— Toni Morrison

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

— Toni Morrison

418. “Good editors are really the third eye. Cool. Dispassionate. They don’t love you or your work.”

— Toni Morrison

419. “I didn’t even know his name. And if I didn’t know his name then there is nothing I did know and I have known nothing ever at all since the one thing I wanted was to know his name so how could he help but leave me since he was making love to a woman who didn’t even know his name.”

— Toni Morrison

420. “One of my kids was born in 1968. There were going to be political difficulties, but they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to.”

— Toni Morrison

421. “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. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.”

— Toni Morrison

422. “All he did from freshman year through sophomore was react – sneer, laugh, dismiss, find fault, demean – a young man’s version of critical thinking.”

— Toni Morrison

423. “The things that help you sleep all the way through it. Back-breaking labor might do it; or liquor. Surely a body – friendly if not familiar – lying next to you. Someone whose touch is a reassurance, not an affront or a nuisance. Whose heavy breathing neither enrages nor disgusts, but amuses you like that of a cherished pet.”

— Toni Morrison

424. “And wouldn’t you know he’d be a singing man.”

— Toni Morrison

425. “In time the whole family perked up like Sesame Street puppets, hoping that cheer, if worked at hard enough, could sugar the living and quiet the dead.”

— Toni Morrison

426. “Don’t let your mouth start nothing your ass can’t stand.”

— Toni Morrison

427. “Sometimes the names were humiliating, deliberately so. Somebody would pick out your flaw. If you were little, they would call you Shorty. And if you were angry, they would call you the Devil.”

— Toni Morrison

428. “A twenty-year-old man so in love with his mother he gave up five years of Sabbaths just to see her sit down for a change.”

— Toni Morrison

429. “Intimacy is extremely important to me and I want it to be extremely important to the readers.”

— Toni Morrison

430. “A writer’s life and work are not a gift to humankind; they are its necessity.”

— Toni Morrison

431. “And if he bathes her in sections, will the parts hold?”

— Toni Morrison

432. “Look to yourself. You free. Nothing and nobody is obliged to save you but you. Seek your own land. You young and a woman and there’s serious limitation in both, but you are a person too. Don’t let Lenore or some trifling boyfriend and certainly no devil doctor decide who you are. That’s slavery. Somewhere inside you is that free person I’m talking about. Locate her and let her do some good in the world.”

— Toni Morrison

433. “For the mouths of her children quickly forgot the taste of her nipples, and years ago they had begun to look past her face into the nearest stretch of sky.”

— Toni Morrison

434. “The loneliness she felt before Frank walked her home from Wang’s cleaners began to dissolve and in its place a shiver of freedom, of earned solitude, of choosing the walls she wanted to break through, minus the burden of shouldering a tilted man. Unobstructed and undistracted, she could get serious and develop a plan to match her ambition and succeed.”

— Toni Morrison

435. “We can be clear. We can identify the enemy. We can begin by asking ourselves what it is right rather than what is expedient. Know the difference between fever and the disease. Between racism and greed. We can be clear and we can be careful. Careful to avoid the imprisonment of the mind, the spirit, and the will of ourselves and those among whom we live. We can be careful of tolerating second-rate goals and secondhand ideas.”

— Toni Morrison

436. “It was a silly age, twenty-five; too old for teenaged dreaming, too young for settling down. Every corner was a possibility and a dead end.”

— Toni Morrison

437. “I always looked upon the acts of racist exclusion, or insult, as pitiable, from the other person. I never absorbed that. I always thought that there was something deficient about such people.”

— Toni Morrison

438. “But Jude,′ she would say, ’you knew me. All those days and years, Jude, you knew me. My ways and my hands and how my stomach folded and how we tried to get Mickey to nurse and how about that time when the landlord said... but you said... and I cried, Jude. You knew me and had listened to the things I said in the night, and heard me in the bathroom and laughed at my raggedy girdle and I laughed too because I knew you too, Jude. So how could you leave me when you knew me?”

— Toni Morrison

439. “For a long time now he knew that anything could appear to b something else, and probably was.”

— Toni Morrison

440. “How soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like forever. As though there never was a time when they didn’t love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves.”

— Toni Morrison

441. “Like the others, they were country people, but how soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city, it is for forever, and it is like forever.”

— Toni Morrison

442. “Is that what happened? Standing in the cane, he was trying to catch a girl he was yet to see, but his heart knew all about, and me, holding on to him but wishing he was the golden boy I never saw either. Which means from the very beginning I was a substitute and so was he.”

— Toni Morrison

443. “Girls can do that. Steer a man away from death or drive him right to it.”

— Toni Morrison

444. “Wait, wait, wait, wait. Don’t try to write through it, to force it. Many do, but that won’t work. Just wait, it will come.”

— Toni Morrison

445. “She became, and her process of becoming was like most of ours: she developed a hatred for things that mystified or obstructed her; acquired virtues that were easy to maintain; assigned herself a role in the scheme of things; and harked back to simpler times for gratification.”

— Toni Morrison

446. “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

447. “I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can’t do anything anyway.”

— Toni Morrison

448. “Nelson Mandela is, for me, the single statesman in the world. The single statesman, in that literal sense, who is not solving all his problems with guns. It’s truly unbelievable.”

— Toni Morrison

449. “Where was the lecture on how slavery alone catapulted the whole country from agriculture into the industrial age in two decades? White folks’ hatred, their violence, was the gasoline that kept the profit motors running.”

— Toni Morrison

450. “Sleep without the fragrance of her hair next to him was impossible.”

— Toni Morrison