Toni Morrison: Trending quotes

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Toni Morrison: 368 quotes30 likes

“Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.”

Toni Morrison book The Bluest Eye

Source: The Bluest Eye

“She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Variant: 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. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.
Source: Beloved

“Pain. I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweettooth for it. Bolts of lightning, little rivulets of thunder.
And I the eye of the storm.”

Toni Morrison book Jazz

Source: Jazz

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

Toni Morrison

Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)
Context: Word-work is sublime... because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference — the way in which we are like no other life.
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

“A dream is just a nightmare with lipstick.”

Toni Morrison

“All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.”

Toni Morrison

As quoted in Grace Notes (1989) by Rita Dove

“I dream a dream that dreams back at me”

Toni Morrison A Mercy

Source: A Mercy

“To get to a place where you could love anything you chose--not to need permission for desire--well now _that_ was freedom.”

Toni Morrison

Beloved (1987)

“Let me tell you something. A man ain’t a goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can’t chop down because they’re inside.”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Source: Beloved

“They encouraged you to put some of your weight in their hands and soon as you felt how light and lovely it was, they studied your scars and tribulations…”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Source: Beloved

“What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.”

Toni Morrison

As quoted in the New York Times Magazine (11 September 1994).

“Not knowing it was hard; knowing it was harder”

Toni Morrison

“If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.”

Toni Morrison

“She learned the intricacy of loneliness: the horror of color, the roar of soundlessness and the menace of familiar objects lying still.”

Toni Morrison A Mercy

Source: A Mercy

“the hopelessness that comes from knowing too little and feeling too much (so brittle, so dry he is in danger of the reverse: feeling nothing and knowing everything)”

Toni Morrison book Jazz

Source: Jazz

“Writing is really a way of thinking--not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.”

Toni Morrison

“What's the world for you if you can't make it up the way you want it?”

Toni Morrison book Jazz

Source: Jazz

“To be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing.”

Toni Morrison A Mercy

Source: A Mercy