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)
I am not a historian; I am a storyteller.
Pain is never permanent.
Words are the most powerful drug used by mankind.
Hold on to your children; they are the future.
Literature is the space where we can dream without fear.
Forgiveness is not approval; it's choosing peace.
The body remembers what the mind forgets.
We must love them both, the body and the mind.
Art invites us to take the journey of a lifetime.
Identity is the product of history and imagination.
Silence can be a roar.
The greatest burden is regret.
Writing is a form of prayer.
Hope is the thing with feathers, but for us, it's the thing with roots.
We don't need more guns; we need more love.
Memory is the thread that binds us.
To be invisible is to be free, but lonely.
Love is never any better than the lover.
She was a friend of my mind. She come back to me, in my mind, over and over again.
Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.
Contemporaries of Toni Morrison
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Toni Morrison (1931–2019).