Toni Morrison Quotes page 2

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

“I dream a dream that dreams back at me”

As quoted in Grace Notes (1989) by Rita Dove

Toni Morrison A Mercy

Source: A Mercy

“Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.”

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

Source: The Bluest Eye

“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.”

Beloved (1987)

“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…”

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.”

Source: Beloved

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

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

“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.”

“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

“Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.”

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

“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

“He licked his lips. ‘Well, if you want my opinion-‘
‘I don’t, ‘ She said. ‘I have my own.”

“Today is always here,' said Sethe. 'Tomorrow, never.”

Source: 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.”

Source: Beloved

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

Source: 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.”

Source: Sula

“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.”

Source: 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.”

“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.”

Source: The Bluest Eye

“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.”

Source: Sula

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

“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?”

Source: The Bluest Eye

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

Source: 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.”

Source: Beloved

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

Source: Sula

Toni Morrison book Song of Solomon

Source: Song of Solomon

“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.”

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

Source: Beloved

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

Source: 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.”

Source: Beloved

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

Toni Morrison book Paradise

Source: 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.”

“You looked at me then like you knew me, and I thought it really was Eden, and I couldn't take your eyes in because I was loving the hoof marks on your cheeks.”

Source: The Bluest Eye

“No matter how hard we try to ignore it, the mind always knows truth and wants clarity.”

Source: Sula

Toni Morrison book God Help the Child

Source: God Help the Child

“Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live”

“In Ohio seasons are theatrical. Each one enters like a prima donna, convinced its performance is the reason the world has people in it.”

Source: The Bluest Eye

“You been gone too long, Sula.

Not too long, but maybe too far.”

Source: Beloved

“I know what every colored woman in this country is doing.... Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I'm going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.”

Source: Sula

“Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.”

Sula (1973)

Toni Morrison book Jazz

Source: Jazz

“Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love a free man is never safe.”

“Nowadays silence is looked on as odd and most of my race has forgotten the beauty of meaning much by saying little. Now tongues work all day by themselves with no help from the mind.”

Source: The Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison Love

Source: Love

“You don't have to love me but you damn well have to respect me.”

Toni Morrison book God Help the Child

Source: God Help the Child

“you got two feet, Sethe, not four." he said, and right then a forest sprang up between them; tactless and quiet.”

“… the change was adjustment without improvement.”

Source: Beloved

“People say to write about what you know. I'm here to tell you, no one wants to read that, cos you don't know anything. So write about something you don't know. And don't be scared, ever.”

Source: The Bluest Eye