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Toni Morrison Quotes | Quotes said by Toni Morrison

  • Toni Morrison Quote #1

    ...maybe you think up North is way different from down South. Don't believe it and don't count on it. Custom is just as real as law and can be just as dangerous.

  • Toni Morrison Quote #2

    …he didn’t needs words or even want them because he knew how they could lie, could heat your blood and disappear.

  • Toni Morrison Quote #3

    Algún día irás andando por el camino y oirás o verás algo. Con toda claridad. Y pensarás que eres tú la que está pensando. Una imagen pensada. Pero no. Es cuando tropiezas con un recuerdo que le pertenece a otro.

  • Toni Morrison Quote #4

    All of that art-for-art’s-sake stuff is BS,” she declares. “What are these people talking about? Are you really telling me that Shakespeare and Aeschylus weren’t writing about kings? All good art is political! There is none that isn’t. And the ones that try hard not to be political are political by saying, ‘We love the status quo.’ We’ve just dirtied the word ‘politics,’ made it sound like it’s unpatriotic or something.” Morrison laughs derisively. “That all started in the period of state art, when you had the communists and fascists running around doing this poster stuff, and the reaction was ‘No, no, no; there’s only aesthetics.’ My point is that is has to be both: beautiful and political at the same time. I’m not interested in art that is not in the world. And it’s not just the narrative, it’s not just the story; it’s the language and the structure and what’s going on behind it. Anybody can make up a story.

  • Toni Morrison Quote #5

    All of us - all who knew her - felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used - to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength. And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.

  • Toni Morrison Quote #6

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

    [Conversation with Elizabeth Farnsworth, PBS NewsHour, March 9, 1998]

  • Toni Morrison Quote #7

    All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

  • Toni Morrison Quote #8

    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 Quote #9

    And in all those escapes he could not help being astonished by the beauty of this land that was not his. He his in its breast, fingered its earth for food, clung to its banks to lap water and tried not to love it. On nights when the sky was personal, weak with the weight of its own stars, he made himself not love it. Its graveyards and its low-lying rivers. Or just a house - solitary under a chinaberry tree; maybe a mule tethered and the light hitting its hide just so. Anything could stir him and he tried hard not to love it.

  • Toni Morrison Quote #10

    And when spring comes to the City people notice one another in the road; notice the strangers with whom they share aisles and tables and the space where intimate garments are laundered. going in and out, in and out the same door, they handle the handle; on trolleys and park benches they settle thighs on a seat in which hundreds have done it too. Copper coins dropped in the palm have been swallowed by children and tested by gypsies, but it’s still money and people smile at that. It’s the time of year when the City urges contradiction most, encouraging you to buy street food when you have no appetite at all; giving you a taste for a single room occupied by you alone as well as a craving to share it with someone you passed in the street. Really there is no contradiction—rather it’s a condition; the range of what an artful City can do. What can beat bricks warming up to the sun? The return of awnings. The removal of blankets from horses’ backs. Tar softens under the heel and the darkness under bridges changes from gloom to cooling shade. After a light rain, when the leaves have come, tree limbs are like wet fingers playing in woolly green hair. Motor cars become black jet boxes gliding behind hoodlights weakened by mist. On sidewalks turned to satin figures move shoulder first, the crowns of their heads angled shields against the light buckshot that the raindrops are. The faces of children glimpsed at windows appear to be crying, but it is the glass pane dripping that makes it seem so.

  • Toni Morrison Quote #11

    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.]

  • Toni Morrison Quote #12

    Apparently he thought he deserved only to be loved--from a distance, though--and given what he wanted. And in return he would be . . . what? Pleasant? Generous? Maybe all he was really saying was: I am not responsible for your pain; share your happiness with me but not your unhappiness.

  • Toni Morrison Quote #13

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

  • Toni Morrison Quote #14

    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 Quote #15

    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.

  • Toni Morrison Quote #16

    Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.

  • Toni Morrison Quote #17

    Birth, life, and death? each took place on the hidden side of a leaf.

  • Toni Morrison Quote #18

    Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.

  • Toni Morrison Quote #19

    Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.

  • Toni Morrison Quote #20

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

  • Toni Morrison Quote #21

    Black women were armed, black women were dangerous and the less money they had the deadlier the weapon they chose.

  • Toni Morrison Quote #22

    But then Job was a man. Invisibility was intolerable to men. What complaint would a female Job dare to put forth? And if, having done so, and He deigned to remind her of how weak and ignorant she was, where was the news in that? What shocked Job into humility and renewed fidelity was the message a female Job would have known and heard every minute of her life.

  • Toni Morrison Quote #23

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

  • Toni Morrison Quote #24

    Can't nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.

  • Toni Morrison Quote #25

    Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live

  • Toni Morrison Quote #26

    Después hizo algo mágico: levantó las piernas y los pies de Sethe y los masajeó hasta que lloró lágrimas saladas.
    -Ahora te dolerá -dijo Amy-. Siempre que lo muerto vuelve a la vida, duele.

  • Toni Morrison Quote #27

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

  • Toni Morrison Quote #28

    Every Saturday morning, first thing before breakfast, his parents held conferences with their children requiring them to answer two questions put to each of them: 1. What have you learned that is true (and how do you know)? 2. What problem do you have?

  • Toni Morrison Quote #29

    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.

  • Toni Morrison Quote #30

    Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.

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