Toni Morrison Quotations | Page 3

Girl, I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me...my lonely is mine.

You need intelligence, and you need to look. You need a gaze, a wide gaze, penetrating and roving - thats what's useful for art.

You have to be willing to think the unthinkable.

I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.

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

As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer.

The men began to trade tales of atrocities, first stories they had heard, then those they'd witnessed, and finally the things that had happened to themselves. A litany of personal humiliation, outrage, and anger turned sicklelike back to themselves as humor. They laughed then, uproariously, about the speed with which they had run, the pose they had assumed, the ruse they had invented to escape or decrease some threat to their manliness, their humanness. All but Empire State, who stood, broom in hand and drop-lipped, with the expression of a very intelligent ten-year-old.

The Nobel Prize is the best thing that can happen to a writer in terms of how it affects your contracts, the publishers, and the seriousness with which your work is taken. On the other hand, it does interfere with your private life, or it can if you let it, and it has zero effect on the writing. It doesn't help you write better and if you let it, it will intimidate you about future projects.

...black women write differently from white women. This is the most marked difference of all those combinations of black and white, male and female. It's not so much that women write differently from men, but that black women write differently from white women. Black men don't write very differently from white men.

I remember a very important lesson that my father gave me when I was twelve or thirteen. He said, "You know, today I welded a perfect seam and I signed my name to it." And I said, "But, Daddy, no one's going to see it!" And he said, "Yeah, but I know it's there." So when I was working in kitchens, I did good work.

Long before I was a success, my parents made me feel like I could be one.

Write about something you don't know. And don't be scared, ever.

Anything I have ever learned of any consequence, I have learned from Black people. I have never been bored by any Black person, ever ...

Do they still call it infatuation? That magic ax that chops away the world in one blow, leaving only the couple standing there trembling? Whatever they call it, it leaps over anything, takes the biggest chair, the largest slice, rules the ground wherever it walks, from a mansion to a swamp, and its selfishness is its beauty.... People with no imagination feed it with sex -- the clown of love. They don't know the real kinds, the better kinds, where losses are cut and everybody benefits. It takes a certain intelligence to love like that -- softly, without props.

Anger ... it's a paralyzing emotion ... you can't get anything done.

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.

[Obama is ] creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom . . . [He is] the man for this time.

The idea of a wanton woman is something I have inserted into almost all of my books. An outlaw figure who is disallowed in the community because of her imagination or activity or status - that kind of anarchic figure has always fascinated me. And the benefits they bring with them, in spite of the fact that they are either dismissed or upbraided - something about their presence is constructive in the long run.

The difference between that which is humane and that which is patriotic is a vital difference.

The concept of physical beauty as a virtue is one of the dumbest, most pernicious and destructive ideas of the Western world, and we should have nothing to do with it.

If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up.

My daddy's face is a study. Winter moves into it and presides there. His eyes become a cliff of snow threatening to avalanche, his eyebrows bend like black limbs of leafless trees. His skin takes on the pale cheerless yellow of winter sun; for a jaw he has the edges of a snowbound field dotted with stubble; his high forehead is the frozen sweep of the Erie.

Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

I know that my books are worthy, which is separate from me.

Let your face speak what's in your heart. When my kids walk in the room my face says I'm glad to see them.

Perhaps that's what all human relationships boiled down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?

She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise. In her country children have bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead to iterate the voice of speechlessness, of disabled and disabling language, of language adults have abandoned altogether as a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance, or expressing love.

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.

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?

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

Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.

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.

The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers.

Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.

Black women are the touchstone by which all that is human can be measured.

All important things are hard.

...the City is what they want it to be: thriftless, warm, scary and full of amiable strangers. No wonder they forget pebbly creeks and when they do not forget the sky completely think of it as a tiny piece of information about the time of day or night.

Which was what love was: unmotivated respect.

You free. Nothing and nobody is obliged to save you but you.

Language can never 'pin down' slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity, is in its reach toward the ineffable.

If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And white people have a very, very serious problem.

Sex is difficult to write about because it's just not sexy enough. The only way to write about it is not to write much. Let the reader bring his own sexuality into the text. A writer I usually admire has written about sex in the most off-putting way. There is just too much information.

I really want some meaning. It used to be easy to toss it off. Now it's harder and harder. You have to navigate just to find something that has nourishment. It's the absence of nourishment. What do you do in place of nourishment? It's usually junk. Either it's junk food or junk clothes or junk ideas.

Love just seems to make life not just livable, but a gallant, gallant event.

Shallow believers prefer a shallow God.

I sometimes lose interest in the characters and get much more interested in the trees and animals.

The language must be careful and must appear effortless. It must not sweat. It must suggest and be provocative at the same time.

Deep, deep trouble. Can't rival the dead for love. Lose every time.

Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not, permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.

Most of our lives are spent in little towns, little towns all throughout the country. That's where we live. And that's where the juices come from and that's where we made it, not made it in terms of success but made who we are.

And they beat. The women for having known them and no more, no more; the children for having been them but never again. They killed a boss so often and so completely they had to bring him back to life to pulp him one more time. Tasting hot mealcake among pine trees, they beat it away. Singing love songs to Mr. Death, they smashed his head. More than the rest, they killed the flirt whom folks called Life for leading them on.

My first-born. All I can remember of her is how she loved the burned bottom of bread. Can you beat that?Eight children and that's all I remember.

Sometimes Joyce is hilarious. I read Finnegans Wake after graduate school and I had the great good fortune of reading it without any help. I don't know if I read it right, but it was hilarious! I laughed constantly! I didn't know what was going on for whole blocks but it didn't matter because I wasn't going to be graded on it. I think the reason why everyone still has so much fun with Shakespeare is because he didn't have any literary critic. He was just doing it; and there were no reviews except for people throwing stuff on stage. He could just do it.

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.

Can't nothing heal without pain, you know.

Love it, love it and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.

You your own best thing, Sethe. You are.

Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs—all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured

All art is knowing when to stop.

Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?

When you know your name, you should hang on to it, for unless it is noted down and remembered, it will die when you do.

Race is the least reliable information you can have about someone. It's real information, but it tells you next to nothing.

I tell my students one of the most important things they need to know is when they are at their best, creatively. They need to ask themselves, What does the ideal room look like? Is there music? Is there silence? Is there chaos outside or is there serenity outside? What do I need in order to release my imagination?

And wouldn't you know he'd be a singing man.

A little black girl yearns for the blue eyes of a little white girl, and the horror at the heart of her yearning is exceeded only by the evil of fulfillment

When a man angers you, he conquers you.

Make a difference, does it? You stay the night here snake get you.

Movements toward freedom and the self-respect that comes from something other than what people think is their most important feature.

Our ancestors are an ever widening circle of hope.

New York is the last true city.

When you stiffen, you know that whatever you stiffen about is very important. The stuff is important, the fear itself is information.

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.

Unless carefree, mother love was a killer.

Let your face speak what's in your heart.

Two parents can't raise a child any more than one. You need a whole community - everybody - to raise a child. And the little nuclear family is a paradigm that just doesn't work. It doesn't work for white people or for black people. Why are we hanging onto it, I don't know. It isolates people into little units - people need a larger unit.

It's always seemed to me that black people's grace has been with what they do with language. In Lorrain, Ohio, when I was a child, I went to school with and heard the stories of Mexicans, Italians, and Greeks, and I listened. I remember their language, and a lot of it is marvelous. But when I think of things my mother or father or aunts used to say, it seems the most absolutely striking thing in the world.

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.

Sweet, she thought. He must think I can't bear to hear him say it. That after all I have told him and after telling me how many feet I have, "goodbye" would break me to pieces. Ain't that sweet. "So long," she murmured from the far side of the trees.

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.

But her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day.

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

My home is such a powerfully imaginative place that the space is almost irrelevant. I think the house I live at on the Hudson is where I belong because it's the only place where I am that I never think about when I'm leaving.

If he looked into her face, he would see those haunted, loving eyes. The hauntedness would irritate him - the love would move him to fury. How dare she love him? Hadn't she any sense at all? What was he supposed to do about that? Return it? How? What could his calloused hands produce to make her smile? What of his knowledge of the world and of life could be useful to her? What could his heavy arms and befuddled brain accomplish that would earn him his own respect, that would in turn allow him to accept her love?

Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? The Lion or the Mouse? Poppy or the Snake?

If you can't count, they can cheat you. If you can't read, they can beat you.

There's a difference between writing for a living and writing for life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises.... If you write for life, you'll work hard; you'll do what's honest, not what pays

What do you say? There really are no words for that. There really aren't. Somebody tries to say, 'I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.' People say that to me. There's no language for it. Sorry doesn't do it. I think you should just hug people and mop their floor or something.

What I'm doing ain't about hating White people. It's about loving us.

Black people's music is in a class by itself and always has been. There's nothing like it. The reason for that is because it was not tampered with by white people. It was not on the media. It was not anywhere except where black people were. And it is one of the art forms in which black people decided what is good in it. Nobody told them. What surfaced and what floated to the top, were the giants and the best.

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.

The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.

Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers - not the defined.

At some point in life, the world's beauty becomes enough.

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.

It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love ... You can't own a human being.

But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.

No gasp at a miracle that is truly miraculous because the magic lies in the fact that you knew it was there for you all along.

Something that is loved is never lost.

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.