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 purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.
The past is not dead, it is not even past.
The world is a beautiful place, and it's worth fighting for.
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
The human spirit is indomitable.
To be human is to be flawed.
The greatest gift you can give someone is your time.
The soul is not a thing, it is a process.
The world is a stage, and we are merely players.
The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable.
The human mind is a powerful tool, but it can also be a dangerous one.
The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
The human condition is a state of constant struggle.
The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.
Narrative is a way to make sense of chaos.
I'm not a political writer, I'm a human writer.
Black people have always been the sophisticated ones, the ones who know how to live in the world.
The past is not a package to be wrapped up and put away.
Certain things are not to be looked at, but to be seen.
Slavery is not a chapter in American history. It is the story.
Contemporaries of Toni Morrison
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Toni Morrison (1931–2019).