Quotes from Toni Morrison

It was lovely. Not to be stared at, not seen, but being pulled into view by the interested, uncritical eyes of the other.

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

He said, 'Always. Always.

Nobody loved her and she wouldn't have liked it if they had, she considered love a serious disability.

A writer's life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.

they ran in the sunlight, creating their own breeze which pressed their dresses into their damp skin. Reaching a kind of square of four locked trees which promised cooling; they flung themselves into the shade to taste their lip sweat and contemplate the wildness that had come upon them so suddenly

Outside, snow solidified itself into graceful forms. The peace of winter stars seemed permanent.

People who die bad don't stay in the ground.

I am nothing to you. You say I am wilderness. I am. Is that a tremble on your mouth, in your eye? Are you afraid? You should be.

Nothing could be counted on in a world where even when you were a solution you were a problem.

You got a life? Live it! Live the motherfuckin life!

She was never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty, and the scale was one she absorbed in full from the silver screen.

Seeing her step so easily from the pantry and emerge looking precisely as she did when she entered, only happier, taught Sula that sex was pleasant and frequent, but otherwise unremarkable.

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!

They were not holding hands, but their shadows were.

Violet learned then what she had forgotten until this moment: that laughter is serious. More complicated, more serious than tears.

It was becoming a habit-this concentration on things behind him. Almost as though there were no future to be had. *Milkman*

In trying to make the slave experience intimate, I hoped the sense of things being both under control and out of control would be persuasive throughout; that the order and quietitude of every day life would be violently disrupted by the chaos of the needy dead; that the herculean effort to forget would be threatened by memory desperate to stay alive. To render enslavement as a personal experience, language must first get out of the way.

There is no such things as race," said Morrison. Racism is a construct; a social construct. And it has benefits. Money can be made off of it. People who don't like themselves can feel better because of it. It can describe certain kinds of behavior that are wrong or misleading. So [racism] has a social function. But race can only be defined as a human being

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.

A child. New life. Immune to evil or illness, protected from kidnap, beatings, rape, racism, insult, hurt, self-loathing, abandonment. Error-free. All goodness. Minus wrath. So they believe.

I sold my elegant blackness to all those childhood ghosts and now they pay me for it.

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?

I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved.