Quotes from Toni Morrison

Mister was allowed to be and stay what he was. But I wasn't allowed to be and stay what I was [...] School teacher changed me. I was something else and that something else was less than a chicken sitting in the sun on a tub. (Paul D.)

A man ain't a goddamn axe, choppin', hackin', bustin' every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can't chop down, because they inside.

She seemed to fold into herself, like a pleated wing. Her pain antagonized me. I wanted to open her up, crisp her edges, ram a stick down that hunched and curving spine, force her to stand erect and spit the misery out on the streets. But she held it in where it could lap up into her eyes.

Bit by bit, at 124 and in the Clearing, along with others, she had claimed herself. Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

Difficult to "move on" from any site of suffering if that suffering goes unacknowledged and undescribed.

Wicked People Love Wickedly, Violent People Love Violently, Weak People Love Weakly, Stupid People Love Stupidly, But The Love Of A Free Man Is Never Safe...

Well, feel this, why don't you? Feel how it feels to have a bed to sleep in and somebody there not worrying you to death about what you got to do each day to deserve it. Feel how that feels. And if that don't get it, feel how it feels to be a colored woman roaming the roads with anything God made liable to jump on you. Feel that.

Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn't get interested in leaving life or living it, let alone the fright of two creeping-off boys. Her past had been like her present—intolerable—and since she knew death was anything but forgetfulness, she used the little energy left her for pondering color.

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.

We become ads for ourselves under the pressure of the spectacle that flattens our experience of the public/private dichotomy.

Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another

Language can never 'pin down' slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity, is in its reach toward the ineffable.

124 was spiteful. Full of baby's venom

Alice thought, No. It wasn't the War and the disgruntled veterans; it wasn't the droves and droves of colored people flocking to paychecks and streets full of themselves. It was the music. The dirty, get-on-down music the women sang and the men played and both danced to, close and shamelesss or apart and wild...It made you do unwise disorderly things. Just hearing it was like violating the law.

Grownups don't pay it much attention because they can't imagine anything more majestic to a child than their own selves and so confused dependance for reverence.

when the little boy discovered, at four, the same thing Mr. Smith had learned earlier -- that only birds and planes could fly -- he lost all interest in himself.

What you want to be when you grow up?" Thomas turned the knob with his left hand and opened the door. "A man," he said and left.

Shadrack rose and returned to the cot, where he fell into the first sleep of his new life. A sleep deeper than the hospital drugs; deeper than the pits of plums, steadier than the condor's wing; more tranquil than the curve of eggs.

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

The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.

Sethe, he says, me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow. He leans over and takes her hand. With the other he touches her face. You your best thing, Sethe, You are. His holding fingers are holding hers. Me? Me?

Nothing and nobody is obliged to save you but you.

It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes, those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights—if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different.

I said you. Take you, my daughter. Because I saw the tall man see you as a human child, not pieces of eight.