Toni Morrison: Trending quotes

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Toni Morrison: 368 quotes30 likes

“Perhaps that's what all human relationships boil down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?”

Toni Morrison book Song of Solomon

Source: Song of Solomon

“guileless and without vanity, we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our own skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness.”

Toni Morrison book The Bluest Eye

Source: The Bluest Eye

“I remember a very important lesson that my father gave me when I was twelve or thirteen. He said, "You know, today I welded a perfect seam and I signed my name to it." And I said, "But, Daddy, no one's going to see it!" And he said, "Yeah, but I know it's there."”

So when I was working in kitchens, I did good work.
As quoted in the New York Times Magazine (11 September 1994).

“Something that is loved is never lost.”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Source: Beloved

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”

“Anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn't like yourself anymore. And though she and others lived through and got over it, she could never let it happen to her own. The best things she was, was her children. Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing — the part of her that was clean.”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Source: Beloved (1987), Ch. 26

“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. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.”

“It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves.”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Source: Beloved

“I am not dead I sit the sun closes my eyes when I open them I see the face I lost Sethe's is the face that left me Sethe sees me see her and I see the smile her smiling face is the place for me it is the face I lost she is my face smiling at me doing it at last a hot thing now we can join.”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Source: Beloved (1987), Ch. 22

“If happiness is anticipation with certainty, we were happy.”

Toni Morrison book The Bluest Eye

Source: The Bluest Eye

“Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.”

Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)

“But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.”

Toni Morrison book The Bluest Eye

Source: The Bluest Eye

“My first-born. All I can remember of her is how she loved the burned bottom of bread. Can you beat that? Eight children and that's all I remember.”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Source: Beloved (1987), Ch. 1

“I wish I’d a knowed more people. I would of loved ‘em all. If I’d a knowed more, I would a loved more”

Toni Morrison book Song of Solomon

Source: Song of Solomon

“But the picking out, the choosing. Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it. I saw you and made up my mind. My mind.”

Toni Morrison book Jazz

Source: Jazz

“And I am all the things I have ever loved: scuppernong wine, cool baptisms in silent water, dream books and number playing.”

“Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.”

Toni Morrison book Jazz

Source: Jazz

“Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Source: Beloved (1987), Ch. 9
Context: Bit by bit, at 124 and in the Clearing, along with others, she had claimed herself. Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

“Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Source: Beloved

“At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens — that letting go — you let go because you can.”

Toni Morrison book Tar Baby

Tar Baby (1981)