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)
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.
If you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.
There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race — scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct.
It's a good idea to be alone in a crowd.
You can't own a human being. You can't lose what you don't own.
The concept of race is the most powerful one in the world.
I'm not a storyteller; I'm a writer. I write stories.
The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.
I don't want to be a 'black' writer. I want to be a writer.
The very act of writing is an act of hope.
Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.
Anger, you know, is a paralyzing emotion... You can't get anything done.
The future was a place where she could make herself up again.
To be a person is to be in a situation.
She was not a woman in love with her children. She was a woman in love with the idea of children.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that when a man is in possession of a good fortune, he must be in want of a wife.
I know that the world is not a safe place. But I also know that it is not a hopeless place.
The human voice is the only instrument that can express the full range of human emotion.
My work is to make sure that the language is not just beautiful, but also precise.
Contemporaries of Toni Morrison
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Toni Morrison (1931–2019).