Quotes from Toni Morrison

The fire seemed to live, go down, or die according to its own schemata. In the morning, however, it always saw fit to die.

In a way she was jealous of death.

schoolteacher didn't take advice from Negroes. The information they offered he called backtalk and developed a variety of corrections (which he recorded in his notebook) to reeducate them.

In Tar Baby , the classic concept of the individual with a solid, coherent identity is eschewed for a model of identity which sees the individual as a kaleidoscope of heterogeneous impulses and desires, constructed from multiple forms of interaction with the world as a play of difference that cannot be completely comprehended.

Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, stupid people love stupidly, weak people love weakly . . .

I don't want to be free of you because I am alive only with you.

the flirt whom folks called Life, lead them on. Making them think the next sunrise would be worth it.

Make no mistake, the privatization of prisons is less about unburdening taxpayers than it is about providing bankrupt communities with sources of income and especially about providing corporations with a captured population available for unpaid labor.

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. Then there is a loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive, on its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one's own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.

some advice about how to keep on with a brain greedy for news nobody could live with in a world happy to provide it.

you just can't mishandle creatures and expect success.

Race is the least reliable information you can have about someone. It's real information, but it tells you next to nothing.

For a long time now he knew that anything could appear to b something else, and probably was.

By and by all trace is gone, and what is forgotten is not only the footprints but the water too and what it is down there. The rest is weather. Not the breath of the disremembered and unaccounted for, but wind in the eaves, or spring ice thawing too quickly. Just weather. Certainly no clamor for a kiss.

Men who knew their manhood lay in their guns and were not even embarrassed by the knowledge that without gunshot fox would laugh at them.

Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

You know, the kind who know Jesus by His first name, but out of politeness never use it even to His face.

Female freedom always means sexual freedom, even when—especially when—it is seen through the prism of economic freedom.

Good editors are really the third eye. Cool. Dispassionate. They don't love you or your work.

Not being at home in one's homeland; [...] being exiled in the place one belongs.

Naturally all of them had a sad story: too much notice, not enough, or the worst kind. Some tale about dragon daddies and false-hearted men, or mean mamas and friends who did them wrong. Each story has a monster in it who made them tough instead of brave, so they open their legs rather than their hearts where that folded child is tucked.

We will be judged by how well we love.

because slave life had busted her legs, back, head, eyes, hands, kidneys, womb and tongue, she had nothing left to make a living with but her heart--which she put to work at once. Accepting no title of honor before her name, but allowing a small caress after it, she became an unchurched preacher, one who visited pulpits and opened her great heart to those who could use it.

she tackled the problem of trying to decide how she wanted to live and what was valuable to her. When am I happy and when am I sad and what us the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world?