Toni Morrison: Trending quotes (page 5)

“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.”

“The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.”

“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.”

“Was it hard? I hope she didn't die hard.'

Sethe shook her head. 'Soft as cream. Being alive was the hard part.”

“I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.”

“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.”

“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?”

“No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you.”

“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.”

“It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love… You can't own a human being.”

“You looking good."
"Devil's confusion. He lets me look good long as I feel bad.”

“Everything depends on knowing how much,” she said, and “Good is knowing when to stop.”

“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.”

“How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.”

“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.”