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 have to remember that fiction is not autobiography, but it is informed by autobiography.
Something that is loved is never lost.
Black people have never been idiots. They've been oppressed.
The writer's job is to get as much as they can out of the darkness.
I am staring out the window because I can't bear to look at the children.
Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names.
I want to look at the edges, the places where it breaks.
To get to a place where you can love, you have to grieve what you lost.
The peace I am thinking of is the peace that is almost the opposite of war.
I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to let its malevolence suffocate our memories of beauty.
We never shape the world; the world shapes us.
Silence is the space where words matter most.
Tell us what the world has been to you in the worst hours.
I write what I want to read.
The past is never dead. It's not even past.
Beauty is not just physical; it's the soul shining through.
Imagination is memory without the pain.
We are our history.
To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving.
The only way to survive is to tell your story.
Contemporaries of Toni Morrison
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Toni Morrison (1931–2019).