Quotes About Toni Morrison

Language can never 'pin down' slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity, is in its reach toward the ineffable.

124 was spiteful. Full of baby's venom

Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth.

Which was what love was: unmotivated respect.

Anything is better than the silence when she answered to hands gesturing and was indifferent to the movement of lips. When she saw every little thing and colors leaped smoldering into view. She will forgo the most violent of sunsets, stars as fat as dinner plates and all the blood of autumn and settle for the palest yellow if it comes from her Beloved.

The idea of a wanton woman is something I have inserted into almost all of my books. An outlaw figure who is disallowed in the community because of her imagination or activity or status — that kind of anarchic figure has always fascinated me.

Oh, yeah. I got big plans. He swallowed twice from the bottle. Any planning in a bottle is short, thought Stamp.

But maybe a man was nothing but a man, which is what Baby Suggs always said. They encouraged you to put some of your weight in their hands and soon as you felt how light and lovely that was, they studied your scars and tribulations, after which they did what he had done: ran her children out and tore up the house.

No, and if it's not your brain thinking cold, cold thoughts, which you can dress in any kind of mood, then it's nothing. It has to be a cold, cold thought. I mean cold, or cool at least. Your brain. That's all there is.

124 WAS SPITEFUL. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For

as pale and sad as "lite" beer

Nothing was out there that this sister-girl did not provide in abundance: a racing heart, dreaminess, society, danger, beauty. She swallowed twice to prepare for the telling, to construct out of the strings she had heard all her life a net to hold beloved.

She stopped then and turned her face toward him and the hateful wind.

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

But the truth was she could not bear to be around thier undead,healthy children.More than envy she felt that each laughing redcheeked child of thiers was an accusation of failure,a mockery of her own.

Sweetheart. That's what the weather was called. Sweetheart weather, the prettiest day of the year.

But the stillness was the sleep of swords.

Originally, Sula opened with 'Except for World War II, nothing interfered with National Suicide Day.' With some encouragement I recognized that sentence as a false beginning." Falseness, in this case, meant abrupt. There was no lobby, as it were, where the reader could be situated before being introduced to the goings-on of the characters.

for in their secret awareness of Him, He was not the God of three faces they sang about. They knew quite well that He had four, and that the fourth explained Sula.

White but European which was not as bad as white and American;

Milton's Paradise is quite available these days, if not in fact certainly as ordinary, unexceptionable desire.

It is not a wholly medieval problem. It is quite a contemporary one: feminine power when directed at other women has historically been wielded in what has been described as a "masculine" manner.

I was physically revolted by and secretly frightened of those round moronic eyes, the pancake face, and orangeworms hair.

There is no way to answer the systemic distortions of the press.