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)
Certain things you can't learn in a classroom.
The past is a ghost, the future a dream, and all we ever have is now.
Racism is a construct, a social construct.
At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph it, paint it or even remember it. It is enough.
A writer's life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.
Could you really love somebody who was not like you? Who did not think the way you did? It was the one thing that worried her.
She had nothing to fall back on; not maleness, not whiteness, not lady-likeness, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality she had invented her kingdom—her life, her self.
The pieces of the story were at last almost in place, and what remained was to fit them together, to make a picture.
It's a good thing to have a little fear. It keeps you from being too brave.
To be a writer is to sit down at a desk and write, not to be a writer and dream.
The act of writing is an act of hope.
What is the world for you if you can't make it up the way you want it?
You can't go to the library and find a book on how to be a black woman.
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 succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge—even wisdom. Like art.
The people who are trying to make you into a victim are the ones who are doing the damage.
There is no such thing as race. None. There is only the human race.
The concept of 'race' is the greatest lie of all time.
I stood at the border, stood at the edge and claimed it as central. Claimed it as a place of power.
We have to be our own best critics.
The very act of writing is a way of saying, 'I am here, and I have something to say.'
Contemporaries of Toni Morrison
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Toni Morrison (1931–2019).