Toni morrison quotes

New York is the last true city.

It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.

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

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.

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.

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.

As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.

All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.

What's the world for you if you can't make it up the way you want it?

When a child walks in the room, your child or anybody else’s child, do your eyes light up? That’s what they’re looking for.

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

Today is always here,' said Sethe. 'Tomorrow, never.

If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.

Somebody has to take responsibility for being a leader.

There is really nothing more to say - except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.

I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge - even wisdom. Like art.

The function of freedom is to free someone else.

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

If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

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.

The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one.

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.

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

Anger ... it's a paralyzing emotion ... you can't get anything done. People sort of think it's an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling — I don't think it's any of that — it's helpless ... it's absence of control — and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers ... and anger doesn't provide any of that — I have no use for it whatsoever." [Interview with CBS radio host Don Swaim, September 15, 1987.]

Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.

Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love 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.

I always know the ending; that's where I start.

Let your face speak what's in your heart.

Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.

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.

I can't explain inspiration. A writer is either compelled to write or not. And if I waited for inspiration I wouldn't really be a writer.

Passion is never enough; neither is skill.

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

A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves - a special kind of double.

I want to discourage you from choosing anything or making any decision simply because it is safe. Things of value seldom are

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

A friend gathers all the pieces and gives them back in the right order.

Writing is really a way of thinking--not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.

People say to write about what you know. I'm here to tell you, no one wants to read that, cos you don't know anything. So write about something you don't know. And don't be scared, ever.

In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent.

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

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.

You are your best thing

The writing is - I'm free of pain. It's the place where I live; it's where I have control; it's where nobody tells me what to do; it's where my imagination is fecund and I am really at my best. Nothing matters more in the world or in my body or anywhere when I'm writing.

Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this mission. No committee decides who may enter, no crisis of body or spirit must accompany the entrant. No tuition is charged, no oath sworn, no visa demanded. Of the monuments humans build for themselves, very few say - touch me, use me, my hush is not indifference, my space is not barrier. If I inspire awe, it is because I am in awe of you and the possibilities that dwell in you.

Something that is loved is never lost.

I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.

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

What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?

Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this mission.

I am a writer and my faith in the world of art is intense, but not irrational, nor naïve - because art takes us and makes us take a journey beyond price, beyond cost, into bearing witness to the world as it is and as it should be. Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.

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.

Make a difference about something other than yourselves.

At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens — that letting go — you let go because you can.

She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it's there, because it can't hurt, and because what difference does it make?

Misery don't call ahead. That's why you have to stay awake - otherwise it just walks on in your door.

There is no civilization that did not begin with art, Whether it was drawing a line in the sand, painting a cave or dancing.

There is an incredible amount of magic and feistiness in black men that nobody has been able to wipe out. But everybody has tried.

Liberation means you don't have to be silenced.

Literature, it seems to me, is wisdom.

Sometimes what I write on the page frightens me, so I feel free when I write, but I don't feel safe.

I don't know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.

The enemy is not men. The enemy is the concept of patriarchy, the concept of patriarchy as the way to run the world or do things.

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

Anything dead coming back to life hurts.

She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.

Laughter is more serious than tears.

You rely on a sentence to say more than the denotation and the connotation; you revel in the smoke that the words send up.

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

It was a fine cry - loud and long - but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.

Your life is already artful-waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.

Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.

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

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

I tell my students there is such a thing as 'writer's block,' and they should respect it. You shouldn't write through it. It's blocked because it ought to be blocked, because you haven't got it right now.

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

If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.

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

Love is never any better than the lover.

We never shape the world . . . the world shapes us.

Racism will disappear when it's no longer profitable, and no longer psychologically useful. And when that happens, it'll be gone. But at the moment, people make a lot of money off of it, pro and con.

You have to be willing to think the unthinkable.

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.

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

There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race - scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct... it has a social function, racism.

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.

Books ARE a form of political action. Books are knowledge. Books are reflection. Books change your mind.

Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.

I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer - its dust and lowering skies.

A dream is just a nightmare with lipstick.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.

I dream a dream that dreams back at me.

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

All important things are hard.

If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down.

Can't nothing heal without pain, you know.

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

We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.

Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

Please don't settle for happiness. It's not good enough. Of course you deserve it, but if that's all you have in mind - happiness - I want to suggest to you that personal success devoid of meaningfulness, free of a steady commitment to social justice - that's more than a barren life. It's a trivial one.

From my point of view, which is that of a storyteller, I see your life as something artful, waiting, just waiting and ready for you to make it art.

My theory is that the world is a difficult place to live in and distraction is the name of the game.

Don’t beg anybody for anything, especially love.

I get angry about things, then go on and work.

When you first start writing-and I think it's true for a lot of beginning writers-you're scared to death that if you don't get that sentence right that minute it's never going to show up again. And it isn't. But it doesn't matter-another one will, and it'll probably be better. And I don't mind writing badly for a couple of days because I know I can fix it-and fix it again and again and again, and it will be better.

One has to work very carefully with what is in between the words. What is not said. Which is measure, which is rhythm and so on. So, it is what you don't write that frequently gives what you do write its power.

At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.

True the Black woman did the housework, the drudgery; true, she reared the children, often alone, but she did all of that while occupying a place on the job market, a place her mate could not get or which his pride would not let him accept.And she had nothing to fall back on: not maleness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality she may very well have invented herself.

From my point of view, your life is already a miracle of chance waiting for you to shape its destiny.

Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.

Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face; you are me.

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

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 important, therefore, to know who the real enemy is, and to know the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn't shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Someone says you have no art so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.

The race thing is sort of a misnomer. It's just the human race, right? That's it. The rest of it, and racism, is socially constructed. Nobody is born racist, no one. What happens is other things that are usually based on power, money, feeling good about yourself, or bad about yourself, those things play into hating other people for whatever reason.

No one ever talks about the moment you found that you were white. Or the moment you found out you were black. That's a profound revelation. The minute you find that out, something happens. You have to renegotiate everything.

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

In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can't take positions that are closed. Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book -- leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity.

Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It's not having no responsibilitie s; it's choosing the ones you want.

I don't think one parent can raise a child. I don't think two parents can raise a child. You really need the whole village.

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.

What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.