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)
It is a truth universally acknowledged that when a woman is in possession of a good fortune, she must be in want of a husband.
Love is divine only and difficult always.
The future was a place she could not visit. It was a place she had to invent.
What is the world for if you can't make it up the way you want it?
I know I have a voice, and I know I have something to say. I just have to figure out how to say it.
The act of writing is an act of discovery, not of creation.
I write out of a need to know, to understand, to make sense of the world.
Language is so powerful. It's the only thing that can really change the world.
My work is to make sure that the voices of the voiceless are heard.
Love is never a mistake. It's always a gift.
There is no such thing as a small life. Every life is vast and complex.
The past is not dead. It's not even past.
Freedom is not a gift. It's a struggle.
To be a writer is to be a witness.
I am not interested in writing about white people. I am interested in writing about black people.
The most important thing is to tell your own story, in your own voice.
Grief is the price we pay for love.
The future is not something we enter. It's something we create.
Art is not a luxury. It's a necessity.
I write to make sense of the world, to make it bearable.
Contemporaries of Toni Morrison
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Toni Morrison (1931–2019).