- Toni Morrison Quotes on Life
- Love Quotes of Toni Morrison
- Toni Morrison Quotes on Writing & Writer
- Toni Morrison Quotes on Beauty
- Toni Morrison Inspirational Quotes
Top Toni Morrison Quotes
- ” I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself. ” – Toni Morrison
- “Can’t nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.” – Toni Morrison
- “Good is knowing when to stop.” – Toni Morrison
- “Let your face speak what’s in your heart.” – Toni Morrison
- “Correct what you can; learn from what you can’t.” – Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison Quotes on Life
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
Birth, life, and death? each took place on the hidden side of a leaf.
Toni Morrison
Death is a sure thing but life is just as certain. Problem is you can’t know in advance.
Toni Morrison
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
Toni Morrison
You got a life? Live it! Live the motherfuckin life!
Toni Morrison
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.
Toni Morrison
Anything dead coming back to life hurts.
Toni Morrison
Love Quotes of Toni Morrison
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.
Toni Morrison
And I am all the things I have ever loved: scuppernong wine, cool baptisms in silent water, dream books and number playing.
Toni Morrison
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?
Toni Morrison
Did you ever see the way the clouds love a mountain? They circle all around it; sometimes you can’t even see the mountain for the clouds. But you know what? You go up top and what do you see? His head. The clouds never cover the head. His head pokes through, because the clouds let him; they don’t wrap him up. They let him keep his head up high, free, with nothing to hide him or bind him.
Toni Morrison
Don’t ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it.
Toni Morrison
Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind.
Toni Morrison
Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, stupid people love stupidly, weak people love weakly . . .
Toni Morrison
Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.
Toni Morrison
Something that is loved is never lost.
Toni Morrison
To get to a place where you could love anything you chose – not to need permission for desire – well now that was freedom.
Toni Morrison
We will be judged by how well we love.
Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison Quotes on Writing & Writer
A writer’s life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.
Toni Morrison
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 ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.
Toni Morrison
Wait, wait, wait, wait. Don’t try to write through it, to force it. Many do but that won’t work. Just wait, it will come.
Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison Quotes on Beauty
Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.
Toni Morrison
Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.
Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison Inspirational Quotes
A good man is a good thing, but there is nothing in the world better than a good woman. She can be your mother, your wife, your girlfriend, your sister, or somebody you work next to. Don’t matter. You find one, stay there. You see a scary one, make tracks.
Toni Morrison
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.
Toni Morrison
All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.
Toni Morrison
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…
Toni Morrison
As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.
Toni Morrison
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
Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.
Toni Morrison
Don’t let anybody, anybody convince you this is the way the world is and therefore must be. It must be the way it ought to be.
Toni Morrison
Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul.
Toni Morrison
For a long time now he knew that anything could appear to be something else, and probably was.
Toni Morrison
Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
Toni Morrison
Hate does that. Burns off everything but itself, so whatever your grievance is, your face looks just like your enemy’s.
Toni Morrison
How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.
Toni Morrison
I always know the ending; that’s where I start.
Toni Morrison
I don’t think many people appreciate silence or realize that it is as close to music as you can get.
Toni Morrison
I get angry about things, then go on and work.
Toni Morrison
I sold my elegant blackness to all those childhood ghosts and now they pay me for it.
Toni Morrison
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. ‘
Toni Morrison
I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can’t teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort.
Toni Morrison
I want to feel what I feel. What’s mine. Even if it’s not happiness, whatever that means. Because you’re all you’ve got.
Toni Morrison
I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.
Toni Morrison
I’m not entangled in shaping my work according to other people’s views of how I should have done it.
Toni Morrison
If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have serious problem.
Toni Morrison
If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.
Toni Morrison
It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.
Toni Morrison
It may even be that some of us know what it is like to be actually hated—hated for things we have no control over and cannot change.
Toni Morrison
It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.
Toni Morrison
Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.
Toni Morrison
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
Like friendship, hatred needed more than physical intimacy; it wanted creativity and hard work to sustain itself.
Toni Morrison
Make up a story…For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light.
Toni Morrison
Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.”
Toni Morrison
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.
Toni Morrison
No more running-from nothing. I will never run from another thing on this Earth. I took one journey and I paid for the ticket, but let me tell you something, Paul D. Garner: it cost too much!
Toni Morrison
Nothing could be counted on in a world where even when you were a solution you were a problem.
Toni Morrison
Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.
Toni Morrison
Pain was greedy; it demanded all of her attention.
Toni Morrison
Race is the least reliable information you can have about someone. It’s real information, but it tells you next to nothing.
Toni Morrison
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
Some things you forget. Other things you never do.
Toni Morrison
Somewhere inside you is that free person I’m talking about. Locate her and let her do some good in the world.
Toni Morrison
The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.
Toni Morrison
The function of freedom is to free someone else.
Toni Morrison
The human body is robust. It can gather strength when it’s in mortal danger.
Toni Morrison
The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.
Toni Morrison
There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship’s, smooths and contains the rocker. It’s an inside kind–wrapped tight like skin.
Toni Morrison
This is the it you’ve been looking for.
Toni Morrison
We never shape the world . . . the world shapes us.
Toni Morrison
What a man leaves behind is what a man is.
Toni Morrison
What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?
Toni Morrison
What you do to children matters. And they might never forget.
Toni Morrison
What’s the world for you if you can’t make it up the way you want it?
Toni Morrison
When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world?
Toni Morrison
When fear rules, obedience is the only survival choice.
Toni Morrison
When good people take you in and treat you good, you ought to try to be good back.
Toni Morrison
When I woke up I reminded myself that freedom is never free. You have to fight for it. Work for it and make sure you are able to handle it. Now.
Toni Morrison
Writing is really a way of thinking – not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.
Toni Morrison
You are about to find out what it takes, how the world is, how it works and how it changes when you are a parent. Good luck and God help the child.
Toni Morrison
You are your best thing.
Toni Morrison
You can’t own a human being. You can’t lose what you don’t own.
Toni Morrison
You couldn’t learn age, but adulthood was there for all.
Toni Morrison
You just can’t mishandle creatures and expect success.
Toni Morrison