Toni Morrison
Nobel laureate exploring African American experience
Most quoted
"Anger...it's a paralyzing emotion...you can't get anything done. People sort of think it's an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling—I don't think it's any of that—it's helpless...it's absence of control—and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers...and anger doesn't provide any of that—I have no use for it whatsoever."
— from Interview
"I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.'"
— from Interview with Oprah Winfrey, 2003
"You are your own stories and therefore are free to invent and imagine what you cannot believe, and you are therefore the guides and the tricksters, the evaders and the illusionists, the musicians and the conjurers that are your own best destiny."
— from The Dancing Mind, 1996
All quotes by Toni Morrison (319)
If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.
Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.
Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a good man is a wonder.
Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.
The function of freedom is to free someone else.
Certain things you can't just let go of.
Sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet love. Oh, Lord, sweet love.
She was a friend of my mind. She come right on in my mind.
At some point in life, the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.
The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.
What's the world for if you can't make it up the way you want it?
You are your best thing.
The past is a country the mind has forgotten but the body remembers.
All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.
Racism is a profound neurosis.
Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.
She had nothing to fall back on; not maleness, not whiteness, not lady-likeness, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality she had invented herself.
The people who love you will never leave you. Even if there are a hundred reasons to give up, they will find one reason to hold on.
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.
Contemporaries of Toni Morrison
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Toni Morrison (1931–2019).