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 write for the people who are not seen, not heard.
The imagination is a powerful tool for change.
Don't let anyone tell you who you are. Define yourself.
The truth is often uncomfortable, but it must be told.
To be alive is to be in constant motion, constant change.
The purpose of art is to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed.
I believe in the power of stories to heal and to connect.
The world is a complicated place, and we need complicated stories to understand it.
Narrative is not a game. It is an act of profound political consequence.
The world is not a safe place for women. It is not a safe place for children. It is not a safe place for black people. It is not a safe place for anybody.
The best art is political and you just have to be smart enough to make it political in a way that doesn't offend.
I'm not a political writer, I'm a writer who is political.
Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.
The past is not a thing to be escaped, but a thing to be understood.
She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.
We have to be able to imagine ourselves as free.
The future of the world is in your hands.
I'm writing for black people, in the same way that Tolstoy was writing for Russians and Faulkner for Southerners.
The world is not going to be saved by people who are afraid to speak up.
I don't want to be a genius. I just want to be a good writer.
Contemporaries of Toni Morrison
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Toni Morrison (1931–2019).