God Help The Child

50 Toni Morrison Quotes To Lift You Up When Life Gets You Down

He can't value you more than you value yourself. 
Holly Riordan
August 24, 2016
“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
— Toni Morrison, The Handy English Grammar Answer Book
Tagged: Books, Reading, Writing
“You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”
— Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
Tagged: Moving On, Success, inspiration
“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”
— Toni Morrison, Beloved
Tagged: Free, Freedom, Choices
“You think because he doesn't love you that you are worthless. You think that because he doesn't want you anymore that he is right -- that his judgement and opinion of you are correct. If he throws you out, then you are garbage. You think he belongs to you because you want to belong to him. Don't.”
— Toni Morrison, An International Journal of Black Thought
Tagged: Love, Relationships, Worth, Value
“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.”
— Toni Morrison, Toni Morrison and the Bible: Contested Intertextualities
Tagged: Dating, Relationships, Ownership
“Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.”
— Toni Morrison, Beloved
Tagged: Love, Black and White, Feelings
“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.”
— Toni Morrison, Embodying Beauty: Twentieth-Century American Women Writers' Aesthetics
Tagged: beauty, Photography, Painting, Memories
“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
“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
“Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.”
— Toni Morrison, Sula
Tagged: Artists, Art, danger
“Love is divine only and difficult always.”
— Toni Morrison, Paradise (Vintage International)
Tagged: Love, divine, difficult, Relationships
“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
“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
“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?”
— Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
Tagged: Beer, Personality, Drinking
“Love is never any better than the lover.”
— Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (Vintage International)
Tagged: Love, Lover, Relationships, Dating
“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
“Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.”
— Toni Morrison, Beloved
Tagged: yesterday, tomorrow, Past, Future
“If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place--the picture of it--stays, and not just in my memory, 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.”
— Toni Morrison, Beloved
Tagged: Forgetting, Memories, Death
“Something that is loved is never lost.”
— Toni Morrison, Beloved
Tagged: Love, lost, Relationships, marriages
“Let me tell you something. A man ain’t a goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can’t chop down because they’re inside.”
— Toni Morrison, Beloved
Tagged: Men, emotions, Feelings, Destruction
“Today is always here. Tomorrow, never.”
— Toni Morrison, Beloved
Tagged: present, Future, Today, tomorrow
“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
“Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly.”
— Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (Vintage International)
Tagged: Love, stupidity, Violence, wicked
“Lonely was much better than alone.”
— Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (Vintage International)
Tagged: Lonely, Alone, Friendship, Relationships
“She left me the way people leave a hotel room. A hotel room is a place to be when you are doing something else. Of itself it is of no consequence to one's major scheme. A hotel room is convenient. But its convenience is limited to the time you need it while you are in that particular town on that particular business; you hope it is comfortable, but prefer, rather, that it be anonymous. It is not, after all, where you live.”
— Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (Vintage International)
Tagged: Comfort, convenience, hotels, Home
“Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.”
— Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (Vintage International)
Tagged: beauty, Makeup, Appearance
“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
“If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.”
— Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
Tagged: Surrender, Optimism, carefree
“You think dark is just one color, but it ain't. There're five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some woolly. Some just empty. Some like fingers. And it don't stay still, it moves and changes from one kind of black to another. Saying something is pitch black is like saying something is green. What kind of green? Green like my bottles? Green like a grasshopper? Green like a cucumber, lettuce, or green like the sky is just before it breaks loose to storm? Well, night black is the same way. May as well be a rainbow.”
— Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
Tagged: Colors, Darkness, Black, shades