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)
The power of language is the power to make us human.
We don't need to be saved. We need to be heard.
The future is not something we enter. The future is something we create.
The work of the artist is to make the world a better place.
There is no such thing as race. There is only the human race.
The only way to get rid of racism is to stop talking about it.
I stood at the border, stood at the edge and claimed it as center. I claimed it as a place where I could be myself.
The beauty of the world is in its diversity.
The world is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived.
I write out of a need to know.
The future is now.
She was a woman who knew her place, and her place was everywhere.
Certain things you can't learn in a classroom. You have to live them.
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.
Racism is a distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.
I'm not a feminist. I'm a woman.
She was a big woman, with a big laugh, and a big appetite for life. And a big mouth.
Sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet love. That's all there is.
The past is already in the future.
Don't tell us what to do, don't tell us what to be. Be what you are. And if you don't know what that is, find out.
Contemporaries of Toni Morrison
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Toni Morrison (1931–2019).