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)
There is really nothing more to say—except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.
She had nothing to fall back on; not maleness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality she may very well have invented herself.
Make up a story. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light.
The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.
Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.
I know what every colored woman in this country is doing. Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I'm going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.
We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.
The best thing she could do was love him a little less, keep her emotions in check so she could manage his.
A dream is just a nightmare with lipstick.
It was a fine cry—loud and long—but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.
He knew that anything could happen now. That's what the world was: a place where anything could happen.
You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.
I don't think anybody cares about wickedness. They just care about the appearance of it.
Bit by bit, she had claimed herself. Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
If you are free, you need to free somebody else.
The little iota of anger that I feel is mine. I earned it. It's my juice. I'm not giving it to anybody.
She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference, and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise.
All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.
The fact of slavery was the most dominant force in shaping American literature.
Contemporaries of Toni Morrison
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Toni Morrison (1931–2019).