Quotes from Toni Morrison

Ashamed of the insults that were being heaped on our friend, we just sat there: I picked toe jam, Frieda cleaned her fingernails with her teeth, and Pecola finger-traced some scars on her knee—her head cocked to one side.

But the free fall, oh no, that required—demanded—invention: a thing to do with the wings, a way of holding the legs and most of all a full surrender to the downward flight if they wished to taste their tongues or stay alive.

Only one mirror has not been covered with chalky paint and that one the man ignores. He does not want to see himself stalking females or their liquid.

Make a difference about something other than yourselves.

Some girls were there too, arguing, it seemed, with one of them.

We are being seduced into accepting truncated, short-term, CEO versions of the world's wholly human race. The loudest voices are urging those already living in day-to-day dread to think of the future in military terms—as a cause for and expression of war. We are being bullied into understanding the human project as a manliness contest where women and children are the most dispensable collateral.

there is something the press can do in language that a society cannot do. You've done it before. Move us closer to participatory democracy; help us distinguish between a pseudo-experience and a living one, between an encounter and an engagement, between theme and life. Help us all try to figure out what it means to be human in the twenty-first century.

There were irreconcilable differences among the congregations in town, but members from all of them merged solidly on the necessity of this action: Do what you have to. Neither the Convent nor the women in it can continue.

What good is a man's life if he can't even choose what to die for?

There are no innocent white people, because every one of them is a potential nigger-killer, if not an actual one. You think Hitler surprised them? You think just because they went to war they thought he was a freak? Hitler's the most natural white man in the world. He killed Jews and Gypsies because he didn't have us. Can you see those Klansmen shocked by him? No, you can't.

Being a minority in both caste and class, we moved about anyway on the hem of life, struggling to consolidate our weaknesses and hang on, or to creep singly up into the major folds of the garment. Our peripheral existence, however, was something we had learned to deal with - probably because it was abstract.

If you want to fly, you have to give up everything that weighs you down.

If you know how to tread, bottomlessness need not concern you.

A real messenger, a worthy one, is corrupted by the message he brings.

O Solomon don't leave me here.

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

You stupid, man. Real stupid. Ain't no law for no colored man except the one sends him to the chair," said Guitar.

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

La construcción del canon es la construcción de un imperio.

When I learned how repulsive this disinterested violence was, that it was repulsive because it was disinterested, my floundered about for refuge. The best hiding place was love. Thus the conversion from pristine sadism to fabricated hatred, to fraudulent love.

for one's language, the one we dream in, is home.

When the land kills of its own volition we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live

Every night. Well, she burnin up down there now, her and her nasty daughter…

Much of the alarm hovering at the borders, the gates, is stoked, it seems to me, by (1) both the threat and the promise of globalism and (2) an uneasy relationship with our own foreignness, our own rapidly disintegrating sense of belonging. Let me begin with globalization. In