“He licked his lips. ‘Well, if you want my opinion-‘‘I don’t, ‘ She said. ‘I have my own.”Toni Morrison book BelovedSource: Beloved
“When you gone to get married? You need to have some babies. It’ll settle you.''I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.”Toni Morrison book SulaSource: Sula
“The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.”Toni Morrison book SulaSource: Sula
“I don't think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It's perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man.”Toni Morrison
“Was it hard? I hope she didn't die hard.'Sethe shook her head. 'Soft as cream. Being alive was the hard part.”Toni Morrison book BelovedSource: Beloved
“Sunk in the grass of an empty lot on a spring Saturday, I split the stems of milkweed and thought about ants and peach pits and death and where the world went when I closed my eyes.”Toni Morrison book The Bluest EyeSource: The Bluest Eye
“There in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning.”Toni Morrison book SulaSource: Sula
“I don't think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they're black or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money. That's what we're upset about.”Toni Morrison
“We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.”Toni Morrison book The Bluest EyeSource: The Bluest Eye
“He leans over and takes her hand. With the other he touches her face. ‘You your best thing, Sethe. You are.’ His holding fingers are holding hers.‘Me? Me?”Toni Morrison book BelovedSource: Beloved
“No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you.”Toni Morrison book BelovedSource: Beloved
“Every now and then she looked around for tangible evidence of his having ever been there. Where were the butterflies? the blueberries? the whistling reed? She could find nothing, for he had left nothing but his stunning absence.”Toni Morrison book SulaSource: Sula
“It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love… You can't own a human being.”Toni Morrison book Song of SolomonSource: Song of Solomon
“You looking good.""Devil's confusion. He lets me look good long as I feel bad.”Toni Morrison book BelovedSource: Beloved
“Everything depends on knowing how much,” she said, and “Good is knowing when to stop.”Toni Morrison book BelovedSource: Beloved
“I always looked upon the acts of racist exclusion, or insult, as pitiable, for the other person. I never absorbed that. I always thought that there was something deficient about such people.”Toni Morrison
“How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.”Toni Morrison book ParadiseSource: Paradise
“I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me.”Toni Morrison book The Bluest EyeSource: The Bluest Eye