Quotes from Toni Morrison

And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive, we were not free, merely licensed, we were not compassionate, we were polite, not good, but well behaved.

When our fears have all been serialized, our creativity censured, our ideas marketplaced, our rights sold, our intelligence sloganized, our strength downsized, our privacy auctioned; when the theatricality, the entertainment value, the marketing of life is complete, we will find ourselves living not in a nation but in a consortium of industries, and wholly unintelligible to ourselves except for what we see as through a screen darkly.

For if Porter did not turn his head and lean toward the door to open it for her, Corinthians believed she would surely die. 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.

truth is trouble.

They deliver right away and with no pain. Just like horses. The young ones smiled a little.

His thoughts were stark, skeletal.

Thrown, in this way, into the binding conviction that only a miracle could save her, she would never know her beauty. She would see only what there was to see: the eyes of other people.

Who say they don't have no pain? Just 'cause she don't cry? 'Cause she can't say it, they think it ain't there? If they looks in her eyes and see them eyeballs lolling back, see the sorrowful look, they'd know.

Taught me a lesson I should have known all along. What you do to children matters. And they might never forget. She's got a big-time job in California but she don't call or visit anymore. She sends me money and stuff every now and then, but I ain't seen her in I don't know how long.

We was girls together

My whole education was to make sure I didn't believe things like that. I dismissed all sorts of things that were indigenous in my family -- superstition and discredited information, and that discredited way of knowing that discredited people always have. But when I began to write, that was the place where I had to go. That's where the information was.

Books are a form of political action. Books are knowledge. Books are reflection. Books change your mind.

You know how a star is supposed to twinkle? We say twinkle because that is how it looks, but when a star feels itself, it's not a twinkle, it's more like a throb. Star throbs. Over and over and over. Like this. Stars just throb and throb and throb and sometimes, when they can't throb anymore, when they can't hold it anymore, they fall out of the sky.

Men leaped and I let myself be caught. For a while, anyway, until my sex life became sort of like Diet Coke—deceptively sweet minus nutrition.

All I can do is read books and write books and edit books and critique books." —Toni Morrison

I don't want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.

Nina Simone helped delay the beginning of the end.

I wish I'd a knowed more people. I would of loved 'em all. If I'd a knowed more, I would a loved more.

If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

I even think now that the land of the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year. This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live.

How long had childhood trauma hurtled him away from the rip and wave of life?

Imagine thinking of history this way! As a thing personally directed at you. As a series of events structured to make you feel one way or another, rather than the precondition of all our lives?

Boredom, which had begun as a mild infection, now took him over completely.

But he could see why she wasn't married; she stirred a mans mind maybe, but not his body.