Quotes from Toni Morrison

Like friendship, hatred needed more than physical intimacy; it wanted creativity and hard work to sustain itself.

The danger of sympathizing with the stranger is the possibility of becoming a stranger. To lose one's racial-ized rank is to lose one's own valued and enshrined difference.

Milkman could hardly breathe. Hagar's voice scooped up what little pieces of heart he had left to call his own.

Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face; you are me.

In your rainbow journey toward the realization of personal goals, don't make choices based only on your security and your safety. Nothing is safe. That is not to say that anything ever was, or that anything worth achieving ever should be. Things of value seldom are. It is not safe to have a child. It is not safe to challenge the status quo. It is not safe to choose work that has not been done before. Or to do old work in a new way. There will always be someone there to stop you.

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?

The things that help you sleep all the way through it. Back-breaking labor might do it; or liquor. Surely a body -- friendly if not familiar -- lying next to you. Someone whose touch is a reassurance, not an affront or a nuisance. Whose heavy breathing neither enrages nor disgusts, but amuses you like that of a cherished pet.

O Jesus, I could be a mule or plow the furrows with my hands if need be or hold those rickety walls up with my back if need be if I knew that somewhere in this world in the pocket of some night I could open my legs to some cowboy lean hips but you are trying to tell me no and O my sweet Jesus what kind of cross is that?

Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth.

I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can't teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort.

Write at the edges of the day.

Without wiping away the tears, taking a deep breath, or even bending his knees—he leaped. For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the wind, you could ride it.

God take what He would, she said. And He did, and He did, and He did and then gave her Halle who gave her freedom when it didn't mean a thing.

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.

You have pissed your last in this house . . . and I don't make velvet roses anymore.

Grown don't mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What's that suppose to mean? In my heart it don't mean a thing.

Language, when it finally comes, has the vigor of a felon pardoned after twenty-one years on hold. Sudden, raw, stripped to its underwear.

Her color is a cross she will always carry.

The sun and the moon shared the horizon in a distant friendship, each unfazed by the other.

You want a real thing?" asked Alice. "I'll tell you a real one. You got anything left to you to love, anything at all, do it.

Whitefolks said he was a witch doctor, but they said that so they wouldn't have to say he was smart. A hunter's hunter that's what he was. Smart as they come. Taught me two lessons I lived by all my life. One was the secret of kindness from white people –they had to pity a thing before they could like it. The other--- oh well, I forgot it." Joe Trace

I started out believing that life was made just so the world would have some way to think about itself, but that it had gone awry with humans because flesh, pinioned by misery, hangs on to it with pleasure.

It wasn't a miracle. Bestowed by God. It was a mercy. Offered by a human.

Gather up your loins, daughter. You named Lillian Florence Jones after my mother. A toughter lady never lived. Find your talent and drive it.