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)
Black women have been the most unprotected, unadorned, and un-cherished of all women.
The people who are trying to make you into a monster are the ones who are monsters.
I stood at the border, stood at the edge and claimed it as central. I claimed it as central, and let the rest of the world move over to where I was.
All good art is subversive.
The future is already here—it's just not evenly distributed.
The trauma is not in the event, but in the memory of the event.
To be a black woman writer is to be an anomaly.
Black people have a right to be angry, but they don't have a right to be stupid.
The world is a mess, and it's always been a mess. But we have to keep trying.
The novel is a way to examine the unexamined life.
I write for black people, and I don't apologize for it.
The white gaze is a burden.
The past is a place of refuge, but it's also a place of danger.
There is no place you can go and be safe, because there is no place that is safe.
The language of the oppressor is not the language of the oppressed.
The only thing that can save us is love.
The novel is a way to make the invisible visible.
The world is full of stories, and we have to tell them all.
The power of language is immense.
The truth is not always beautiful, but it is always true.
Contemporaries of Toni Morrison
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Toni Morrison (1931–2019).