Quotes from Toni Morrison

What excited and challenged her shipmates horrified the churched women and each set believed the other deeply, dangerously flawed. Although they had nothing in common with the views of each other, they had everything in common with one thing: the promise and threat of men. Here, they agreed, was where security and risk lay. And both had come to terms.

Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something

Now I can look at things again because she's here to see them too.

Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.

Maybe it hadn't been a community, but it had been a place. Now there weren't any places left, just separate houses with separate televisions and separate televisions and less and less dropping by.

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

Long ago, before I met her, she twisted her blond hair into dreadlocks and, pretty as she is, the locks add an allure she wouldn't otherwise have.

Deacon began to speak of a woman who he had used; how he had turned up his nose at her because her loose and easy ways gave him the license to drop and despise her. That while the adultery preyed on him for a short while (very short), his long remorse was at having become what the Old Fathers cursed: the kind of man who set himself up to judge, rout and even destroy the needy, the defenseless, the different.

Our girlhood was spent like a found nickel on you. When you slept, we were quiet; when you were hungry, we cooked; when you wanted to play, we entertained you; and when you got grown enough to know the difference between a woman and a two-toned Ford, everything in this house stopped for you.

The mind of him that knew her own. Her story was bearable because it was his as well—to tell, to refine and tell

The mind of him that knew her own. Her story was bearable because it was his as well—to tell, to refine and tell again.

Taught me a lesson I should have known all along. What you do to children matters. And they might never forget.

My mother danced all night and Roberta's was sick.

She was a tall woman with unfashionable hips and a long chestnut braid singing down her back.

the lesson she had learned from her sixty years a slave and ten years free: that there was no bad luck in the world but whitepeople. "They don't know when to stop," she said, and returned to her bed, pulled up the quilt and left them to hold that thought forever

If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem.

Misery don't call ahead. That's why you have to stay awake—otherwise it just walks on in your door.

Wat hij deed (...) stanste het glanzende ijzer uit Sethes ogen, zodat er twee putten overbleven die de gloed van het vuur niet weerkaatsten.

At some point in life the worlds beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough

What does 'poor' mean? No television?" Steve raised his eyebrows. "It means no money," said Bride. "Same thing," he answered. "No money, no television." "Means no washing machine, no fridge, no bathroom, no money!" "Money get you out of that Jaguar? Money save your ass?

We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain make us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humour. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous...We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty...

The price of wealth, historically, has been blood, annihilation, death, and despair.

Saying more might push them both to a place they couldn't get back from. He would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut. He would not pry it loose now in front of this sweet sturdy woman, for if she got a whiff of the contents it would shame him. And it would hurt her to know that there was no red heart bright as Mister's comb beating in him.

Sleep without the fragrance of her hair next to him was impossible.