Quotes from Toni Morrison

This extraordinary story you hold in your hands was specifically intended as "an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial.

We live in a world where justice equals vengeance. Where private profit drives public policy.

She stopped then and turned her face toward him and the hateful wind.

Ona je prijatelj mog uma. Ona me je skupila, ?ove?e. Ove komadi?e od mene ona je skupila i vratila mi ih svaki na svoje mesto. Dobro je, znaš, imati ženu koja je prijatelj tvog uma.

Both of those conditions (my own awareness of being a native of a country and an alien in it) are of interest to me as a writer, and I'd like to talk about that expected and perhaps inevitable sense of separatedeness from the culture that pervades the country I live in.

And him. Eighteen seventy-four and whitefolks were still on the loose.

She did not know it then, but the word baby, said softly and with such kindness, that inaugurated her life in the world as a woman.

She heard it as though it were what language was made for

The day breeze blew her dress dry; the night wind wrinkled it.

Marriages performed within,' read the sign next to the coffeehouse door, underneath in small letters a verse that combined warning with a sales pitch: 'When lawless lust hath conceived it bringeth forth sin.

Well, you know, doctors need to work on the dead poor so they can help the live rich.

Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can't nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly, you gotta give up the shit that weighs you down.

Everything depends on knowing how much {and} Good is knowing when to stop.

Any planning in a bottle is short, thought Stamp, but he knew from personal experience the pointlessness of telling a drinking man not to.

She is a friend of my mind. She gathers me man. The pieces I am, she gathers them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.

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

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.

Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced, women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath.

She knew from personal experience how hard loving was, how selfish and how easily sundered. Withholding sex or relying on it, ignoring children or devouring them, rerouting true feelings or locking them out. Youth being the excuse for that fortune-cookie love—until it wasn't, until it became pure adult stupidity.

thank God I ain't never had one of them graveyard loves.

They stopped me from getting us there, but they didn't stop you from getting here. Ha ha.

Here freedom was not entertainment, like a carnival or a hoedown that you can count on once a year. Nor was it the table droppings from the entitled. Here freedom was a test administered by the natural world that a man had to take for himself every day. And if he passed enough tests long enough, he was king.

Listen to me. You are about to find out what it takes, how the world is, how it works and how it changes when you are a parent. Good luck and God help the child.

One taught her the alphabet; another a stitch. All taught her how it felt to wake up at dawn and decide what to do with the day.