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 people who are trying to make you into a victim are the ones who are victimizing you.
I'm writing for black people, in the same way that Tolstoy was writing for Russians, but nobody ever called him a Russian writer. They called him a writer.
She was a woman who knew how to keep a secret, and how to use it.
The human body is a funny thing. It can take a lot of abuse, but it can also break down for no reason at all.
I don't want to be a 'black writer.' I want to be a writer.
The problem with the world is that everyone is trying to be someone else.
You can't have a good story without a little bit of trouble.
I stood at the border, stood at the edge and claimed it as center. I claimed it as home.
The world is full of people who are trying to tell you who you are. Don't let them.
She was a woman who knew how to make a man feel like a king, and how to make him pay for it.
The future is not a gift. It is an achievement.
There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.
The only thing that can save us is ourselves.
The past is not a place to visit. It's a place to live.
I'm not interested in writing about white people. I'm interested in writing about black people.
The work of the writer is to make the world visible.
You can't be a victim and a survivor at the same time.
The problem with being a writer is that you have to write.
The world is a mess, and it's up to us to clean it up.
She was a woman who knew how to get what she wanted, and she usually did.
Contemporaries of Toni Morrison
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Toni Morrison (1931–2019).