Quotes from Toni Morrison

Now I know why Baby Suggs pondered color her last years. She never had time to see, let alone enjoy it before.

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.

How to be both free and situated; how to convert a racist house into a race-specific yet nonracist home? How to enunciate race while depriving it of its lethal cling? They are questions of concept, of language, of trajectory, of habitation, of occupation, and, although my engagement with them has been fiece, fitful, and constantly (I think) evolving, they remain in my thoughts as aesthetically and pollitically unresolved.

You can't protect her every minute.

Fondling their weapons, feeling suddenly so young and good they are reminded that guns are more than decoration, intimidation or comfort. They are meant.

124 was spiteful.

I'm a Midwesterner, and everyone in Ohio is excited. I'm also a New Yorker, and a New Jerseyan, and an American, plus I'm an African-American, and a woman. I know it seems like I'm spreading like algae when I put it this way, but I'd like to think of the prize being distributed to these regions and nations and races.

We must do all we can to imagine the Other before we presume to solve the problems work and life demand of us.

And then she knew. Her friends and neighbors were angry at her because she had overstepped, given too much, offended them by excess.

she needed to confirm its presence. Like the keeper of the lighthouse and the prisoner, she regarded it as a mooring, a checkpoint, some stable visual object that assured her that the world was still there; that this was like and not a dream. That she was alive somewhere, inside, which she acknowledged to be true only because a thing she knew intimately was out there, outside of herself.

Nobody counted on Garner dying. Nobody thought he could. How 'bout that? Everything rested on Garner being alive. Without his life each of theirs fell to pieces. Now ain't that slavery or what is it?

It was the first time I knew beautiful. Had imagined it for myself. Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.

He would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be.

Sitting on the train to Atlanta, Frank suddenly realized that those memories, powerful as they were, did not crush him anymore or throw him into paralyzing despair. He could recall every detail, every sorrow, without needing alcohol to steady him. Was this the fruit of sobriety?

Lay my head on the railroad line, Train come along, pacify my mind.

Kalabal?klar içinde olmak isteyenler yaln?zl?k çekenlerdir hep.

Like the others, they were country people, but how soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city, it is for forever, and it is like forever.

Girls can do that. Steer a man away from death or drive him right to it.

his mild cynicism morphed into depression.

You accepted like a beast of burden the whip of a stranger's curse and the mindless menace it holds along with the scar it leaves as a definition you spend your life refuting although that hateful word is only a slim line drawn on a shore and quickly dissolved in a seaworld any moment when an equally mindless wave fondles it like the accidental touch of a finger on a clarinet stop that the musician converts into silence in order to let the true note ring out loud.

Oh, yeah. I got big plans. He swallowed twice from the bottle. Any planning in a bottle is short, thought Stamp.

Se libérer était une chose, revendiquer la propriété de ce moi libéré en était une autre.

This is precisely the time when artists go to work—not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That's our job!" Toni Morrison

And you look like the north side of a southbound mule.