Quotes from Toni Morrison

cemetery as old as sky

living activity of the dead)

My puzzlement used to be 'why is the Lone Ranger' called 'lone' if he is always with Tonto. Now, I see that given the racial and metaphorical nature of the relationship, he is able to be understood as 'alone' precisely because of Tonto. Without him, he would be, I suppose, simply 'Ranger'.

The doctor raised the gun and pointed it at what in his fear ought to have been flaring nostrils, foaming lips, and the red-rimmed eyes of a savage. Instead he saw the quiet, even serene, face of a man not to be fooled with.

Well, you not the first by a long shot. An integrated army is integrated misery. You all go fight, come back, they treat you like dogs. Change that. They treat dogs better.

Writing of, about, and within a world committed to racial dominances without employing the linguistic strategies that supported it seemed to me the most urgent, fruitful, challenging work a writer could take on.

It was poisonous, unnatural to let the dead go with a mere whimpering, a slight murmur, a rose bouquet of good taste. Good taste was out of place in the company of death, death itself was the essence of bad taste. And there must be much rage and saliva in its presence. The body must move and throw itself about, the eyes must roll, the hands should have no peace, and the throat should release all the yearning, despair and outrage that accompany the stupidity of loss.

Rainwater held on to pine needles for dear life and Beloved could not take her eyes off Sethe.

Lying on a ring of onion, a tomato slice exposed its seedy smile, one she remembers to this moment.

That all they want, man, is they own misery. Ax em to die for you and they yours for life.

She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they could not have it

She banged her knuckles until they ached to get the attention of the living flesh behind the glass, and would have smashed her fist through the window just to touch him, feel his heat, the only thing that could protect her from a smothering death of dry roses.

The disease they suffered now was a mere inconvenience compared to the devastation they remembered.

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

Sky provided the only drama, and counting on a Cincinnati horizon for life's principal joy was reckless indeed.

Sethe," he says, "me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.

I think it is time for a modern War Against Error. A deliberately heightened battle against cultivated ignorance, enforced silence, and metastasizing lies. A wider war that is fought daily by human rights organizations in journals, reports, indexes, dangerous visits, and encounters with malign oppressive forces. A hugely funded and intensified battle of rescue from the violence that is swallowing the dispossessed.

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?

There is a loneliness that can be rocked. It's an inside kind—wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own.

It's gonna hurt, now,' said Amy. 'Anything dead coming back to life hurts.

There's plenty, isn't there? Not those frycake things they like but good hot food the winters are so bad we need coal a sin to burn trees on the prairie yesterday the snow sifted in under the door quaesumus, da propitius pacem in diebus nostris Sister Roberta is peeling the onions et a peccato simus semper liberi can't you ab omni perturbatione securi…

Listening to the doves in Alfred, Georgia, and having neither the right nor the permission to enjoy it because in that place mist, doves, sunlight, copper dirt, moon—everything belonged to the men who had the guns

close to the fire you could

They began to pilfer in earnest, and it became not only their right but their obligation.