Quotes from Toni Morrison

If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.

As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.

It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.

He licked his lips. 'Well, if you want my opinion-' 'I don't, ' She said. 'I have my own.

It was a fine cry - loud and long - but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.

He wants to put his story next to hers.

Something that is loved is never lost.

Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.

Lonely was much better than alone.

Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.

A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves - a special kind of double.

Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it's not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place--the picture of it--stays, and not just in my remory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don't think if, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.

Gimme hate, Lord," he whimpered. "I'll take hate any day. But don't give me love. I can't take no more love, Lord. I can't carry it...It's too heavy. Jesus, you know, you know all about it. Ain't it heavy? Jesus? Ain't love heavy?

All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in. [Conversation with Elizabeth Farnsworth, PBS NewsHour , March 9, 1998]

We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.

Anything dead coming back to life hurts.

In a way, her strangeness, her naiveté, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of an idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings, had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like an artist with no art form, she became dangerous.

When you gone to get married? You need to have some babies. It'll settle you.' 'I don't want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.

She left me the way people leave a hotel room. A hotel room is a place to be when you are doing something else. Of itself it is of no consequence to one's major scheme. A hotel room is convenient. But its convenience is limited to the time you need it while you are in that particular town on that particular business; you hope it is comfortable, but prefer, rather, that it be anoymous. It is not, after all, where you live.

if they put an iron circle around your neck I will bite it away

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

I dream a dream that dreams back at me

She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather 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.

Let me tell you something. A man ain't a goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can't chop down because they're inside.