1. People
    2.  › 
  2. Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison photo

Toni Morrison Quotes

Total quotes: 88
“I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer – its dust and lowering skies.”
— Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
Tagged: Summer, Summer Fruit, Beautiful Summer, Summer Feels
“At some point in life, the world’s beauty becomes enough.”
— Toni Morrison, Tar Baby
Tagged: beauty, Perspective
“You are your best thing.”
— Toni Morrison, Beloved
Tagged: Empowering, Encouragement, motivation
“Something that is loved is never lost.”
— Toni Morrison, Beloved
Tagged: Love, lost, Relationships, marriages
“Every now and then she looked around for tangible evidence of his having ever been there. Where were the butterflies? The blueberries? The whistling reed? She could find nothing, for he had left nothing but his stunning absence.”
— Toni Morrison, Sula
Tagged: Gone, Dating, Men, Alone
“It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.”
— Toni Morrison, Sula
Tagged: Missing, good fortune, Lucky
“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.”
— Toni Morrison, Sula
Tagged: Laughter, giggling, Happiness
“In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.”
— Toni Morrison, Words on Words: Quotations about Language and Languages
Tagged: American, white, nationality
“Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another--physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.”
— Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (Vintage International)
Tagged: beauty, Love, Envy, Insecurity
“My feelings are the result of prejudices and convictions like everybody else’s. ”
— Toni Morrison, Toni Morrison, The Art of Fiction No. 134
Tagged: Feelings, Prejudice, Convictions
“Race has been a constant arbiter of difference, as have wealth, class, and gender— each of which is about power and the necessity of control.”
— Toni Morrison, The Origin of Others(The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures)
Tagged: Racism In America, racism, classism
“One purpose of scientific racism is to identify an outsider in order to define one’s self. Another possibility is to maintain (even enjoy) one’s own difference without contempt for the categorized difference of the Othered.”
— Toni Morrison, The Origin of Others(The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures)
Tagged: Race Bias, Race relations, Race and Ethnicity
“Writing before dawn began as a necessity—I had small children when I first began to write and I needed to use the time before they said, Mama—and that was always around five in the morning.”
— Toni Morrison, Toni Morrison, The Art of Fiction No. 134
Tagged: Writing
“Since no one is born a racist and there is no fetal predisposition to sexism, one learns Othering not by lecture or instruction but by example.”
— Toni Morrison, The Origin of Others(The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures)
Tagged: Race Bias, Race relations, Race and Ethnicity, Sexism
“When I’m not thinking about a novel, or not actually writing it, it’s not very good; the 21st century is not a very nice place. I need it (writing) to just stay steady, emotionally.”
— Toni Morrison, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison dead at 88
Tagged: Writing In The 21st Century
“But although history should not become a straitjacket, which overwhelms and binds, neither should it be forgotten.”
— Toni Morrison, Toni Morrison, The Art of Fiction No. 134
Tagged: History, straitjacket
“I could read when I was three years old and that’s what I did. At some point, I realized that there was a book I wanted to read, that nobody had written. I really wanted to read it, and the only way I could was to write it.”
— Toni Morrison, Toni Morrison on Reality TV, Black Lives Matter, and Meeting Jeff Bezos
Tagged: Reading, precocious, Writing
“Think about it: If you come to this country from Germany, or Russia, or anywhere, you get off the boat, get on the land. But in order to become an American, you have to be white.”
— Toni Morrison, Toni Morrison In Conversation | Granta Magazine
Tagged: Germany, Russia, Whiteness
“There are so many opportunities to reveal race in literature— whether one is conscious of it or not. But writing non-colorist literature about black people is a task I have found both liberating and hard.”
— Toni Morrison, The Origin of Others(The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures)
Tagged: Race Bias, Race relations, Race and Ethnicity, Writing and Expression
“The forbidden word can be provocative. But after a while it becomes monotonous rather than arousing.”
— Toni Morrison, Toni Morrison, The Art of Fiction No. 134
Tagged: forbidden words, Obscenity, Monotony
“I was saying last night that nobody loves like children, they don’t know if you’re black, white, or poor.”
— Toni Morrison, Toni Morrison on Reality TV, Black Lives Matter, and Meeting Jeff Bezos
Tagged: Children, Love, Black, white, rich, poor
“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”
— Toni Morrison, Beloved
Tagged: Free, Freedom, Choices
“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.”
— Toni Morrison, The Everything Guide to Codependency
Tagged: Anger, emotions, helpless, Passion
“Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.”
— Toni Morrison, Beloved
Tagged: yesterday, tomorrow, Past, Future
“It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves.”
— Toni Morrison, Beloved
Tagged: Hell, Death, beauty
“Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.”
— Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (Vintage International)
Tagged: beauty, Makeup, Appearance
“Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.”
— Toni Morrison, Beloved
Tagged: sisterhood, Family, Sisters, Conversations, Daydreams
“In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood.”
— Toni Morrison, Sula
Tagged: first lines of books
“We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.”
— Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (Vintage International)
Tagged: Violence, Passion, Freedom
“Jealousy we understood and thought natural... But envy was a strange, new feeling for us.”
— Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (Vintage International)
Tagged: Jealousy, Envy, Feelings
“The human body is robust. It can gather strength when it's in mortal danger.”
— Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
Tagged: human, strength, danger, Strong
“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.”
— Toni Morrison, "Language is a Place of Struggle": Great Quotes by People of Color
Tagged: Repression, confined, trapped
“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.”
— Toni Morrison, Beloved
Tagged: weird loving friendship, Mind, pieces, Fix
“Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.”
— Toni Morrison, Jazz
Tagged: Love, Falling In Love, Relationships, Dating
“How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.”
— Toni Morrison, Paradise (Vintage International)
Tagged: Happiness, Imagination, Goals
“Where do you get the right to decide our lives? I'll tell you where. From that little hog's gut that hangs between your legs. Well, let me tell you something... you will need more than that.”
— Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
Tagged: Men, Power, gender
“The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.”
— Toni Morrison, Sula
Tagged: Evil, Survival, Triumph, Win
“A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves - a special kind of double.”
— Toni Morrison, Dance of Freedom and Desire
Tagged: sister, Siblings, Family
“Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.”
— Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (Vintage International)
Tagged: Anger, Awareness, Feelings, emotions
“In other works, such as The Bluest Eye, the consequences of the color fetish are the theme: its severely destructive force.”
— Toni Morrison, The Origin of Others(The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures)
Tagged: Race Bias, Race relations, Race and Ethnicity
loading next page...