Toni Morrison Mean Quotations

Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it's not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place--the picture of it--stays, and not just in my remory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don't think if, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.

I want to feel what I feel. What's mine. Even if it's not happiness, whatever that means. Because you're all you've got.

Liberation means you don't have to be silenced.

Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich inherit it. I don't mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network.

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.

Being good to somebody is just like being mean to somebody. Risky. You don't get nothing for it.

If you take racism away from certain people - I mean vitriolic racism as well as the sort of social racist - if you take that away, they may have to face something really terrible - misery, self-misery, and deep pain about who they are.

The theme you choose may change or simply elude you, but being your own story means you can always choose the tone. It also means that you can invent the language to say who are you and what you mean.

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

In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.

Black women have always been friends. I mean, if you didn't have each other you had nothing.

You are your own stories and therefore free to imagine and experience what it means to be human.... And although you don't have complete control over the narrative (no author does, I can tell you), you could nevertheless create it.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.