Quotes from Toni Morrison

We glean what is public primarily, but not exclusively, from media.

Either the pavement was burning or she had sapphires hidden in her shoes. K.D., who had never seen a woman mince or switch like that, believed it was the walk that caused all the trouble.

He read greedily but understood selectively, choosing the bits and pieces of other men's ideas that supported whatever predilection he had

It could be sweat, but it hurt enough to be blood.

I thought about chops. I thought about chops.

Listen. baby, people do funny things. Specially us. The cards are stacked against us and just trying to stay in the game, stay alive and in the game, makes us do funny things. Things we can't help. Things that make us hurt one another. We don't even know why. But look here, don't carry it inside and don't give it to nobody else. Try to understand it, but if you can't just forget it and keep yourself strong, man.

They beat their children with one hand and stole for them with the other. The hands that felled trees also cut umbilical cords; the hands that wrung the necks of chickens and butchered hogs also nudged African violets into bloom; the arms that loaded sheaves, bales, and sacks rocked babies into sleep. They patted biscuits into flaky ovals of innocence—and shrouded the dead. They plowed all day and came home to nestle like plums under the limbs of their men.

I did not want to feel anything that did not originate with me. Because the big deal, as they described it, was that it made you feel so good. I did not want to feel something that was dependent on it. I want to feel what I feel. What's mine. Even if it's not happiness, whatever that means. Because you're all you've got.

Yours was the courage to live life in and from its belly as well as beyond its edges.

Every nigger I know wants to be cool. There's nothing wrong with controlling yourself, but can't can't nobody control other people.

But where is the brilliant research, the enlightening books, the masterpieces I used to dream of producing? Nowhere. Instead I write notes about the shortcomings of others. Easy. So easy. What about my own?

Poison is like the drowned; it always floats.

There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralised, frozen in the glare of the lover's inward eye.

Above all he wanted to escape what he knew, escape the implications of what he had been told. And all he knew in the world about the world was what other people had told him.

Nasty white folks is about the nastiest things they is.

Good stretched her pleasure.

Fue una sombra la mayor parte de mi vida, una presencia que señalaba su propia ausencia, o tal vez la mía. Quién soy yo sin ella, esa niña desnutrida de ojos tristes que esperan. Cómo temblaba cuando nos escondimos de las paladas. Le tapé la cara, los ojos, con la esperanza de que no hubiera visto el pie que asomaba de la tumba

C'est la haine qui fait cet effet. Elle consume tout, sauf elle-même, si bien que, quelque soit votre chagrin, votre visage devient exactement le même que celui de votre ennemi.

she felt newly born. No longer forced to relive, no, outlive the disdain of her mother and the abandonment of her father.

Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another--physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap.

Consider another consequence of the blatant, violent uses to which foreignness is put—ethnic cleansing. We would be not merely remiss but irrelevant if we did not address the doom currently faced by millions of people reduced to animal, insect, or polluted status by nations with unmitigated, unrepentant power to decide who is a stranger and whether they live or die at, or far from, home.

The loneliness she felt before Frank walked her home from Wang's cleaners began to dissolve and in its place a shiver of freedom, of earned solitude, of choosing the walls she wanted to breakthrough, minus the burden of shouldering a tilted man. Unobstructed and undistracted, she could get serious and develop a plan to match her ambition and succeed.

When he visited his and Adam's old bedroom, the thread of disapproval he'd felt during his proposal of a memorial became a rope, as he saw the savage absence not only of Adam but of himself. So when he shut the door on his family and stepped out into the rain it was an already belated act.

I'm crazy about this City. Daylight slants like a razor cutting the buildings in half. In the top half I see looking faces and it's not easy to tell which are people, which the work of stonemasons. Below is a shadow where any blasé thing takes place: clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the voices of sorrowful women. A city like this one makes me dream tall and feel in on things.