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Toni Morrison Quotes
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Toni Morrison is an American novelist, essayist, editor, teacher, and professor emerita at Princeton University.

Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award in 1988 for Beloved. The novel was adapted into a film of the same name in 1998. Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. In 1996, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected her for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. She was honored with the 1996 National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Morrison wrote the libretto for a new opera, Margaret Garner, first performed in 2005. On May 29, 2012, President Barack Obama presented Morrison with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2016 she received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.

✵ 18. February 1931 – 5. August 2019
Toni Morrison photo
Toni Morrison: 184 quotes30 likes

Toni Morrison Quotes

“white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President”

Toni Morrison

About Bill Clinton. Comment, The New Yorker, 5 October 1998.
Source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1998/10/05/comment-6543

“Women's rights is not only an abstraction, a cause; it is also a personal affair. It is not only about "us"; it is also about me and you. Just the two of us.”

Toni Morrison

Commencement address at Barnard College (May 1979) as quoted in Ms. magazine (September 1979)

“Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.”

Toni Morrison

Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)

“This is not a story to pass on.”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Source: Beloved (1987), Ch. 28

“The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.”

Toni Morrison

"Black Matters" in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)

“I was thrilled that my mother is still alive and can share this with me. And I can claim representation in so many areas. I'm a Midwesterner, and everyone in Ohio is excited. I'm also a New Yorker, and a New Jerseyan, and an American, plus I'm an African-American, and a woman. I know it seems like I'm spreading like algae when I put it this way, but I'd like to think of the prize being distributed to these regions and nations and races.”

Toni Morrison

On receiving the Nobel Prize, in The New York Times (8 October 1993) http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/01/11/home/28957.html

“It is sprinkling now. A teasing August rain that raises expectations it cannot fill.”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Beloved (1987)

“Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they were right. The more coloredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Beloved (1987)

“Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers — not the defined.”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Beloved (1987)

“With that, she gathered her blanket around her elbows and ascended the lily-white stairs like a bride. Outside, snow solidified itself into graceful forms. The peace of winter staars seemed permanent.”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Beloved (1987)

“Could she sing? (Was it nice to hear when she did?) Was she pretty? Was she a good friend? Could she have been a loving mother? A faithful wife? Have I got a sister and does she favor me? If my mother knew me would she like me?”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Beloved (1987)

“Unless carefree, motherlove was a killer.”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Beloved (1987)

“Darkness or not, she moves rapidly around, reaching, touching cobwebs, cheese, slating shelves, the pallet interfering with each step. If she trumbles, she is not aware of it because she does not know where her body stops, which part of her is an arm, a foot or a knee. She feels like an ice cake torn away from the solid surface of the stream, floating on darkness, thick and crashing against the edges of things around it. Breakable, meltable and cold.”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Beloved (1987)

“It was noon, quite light outside; inside it is not. A few cuts of sun break through the roof and walls but once there they are too weak to shift for themselves. Darkness is stronger and swallows them like minnows.”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Beloved (1987)

“They killed the flirt whom folks called Life for leading them on. Making them think the next sunrise would be worth it; that another stroke of time would do it at last. Only when she was dead would they be safe. The successful ones — the ones who had been there enough years to have maimed, mutilated, maybe even buried her — kept watch over the others who were still in her cock-teasing hug, caring and looking forward, remembering and looking back.”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Beloved (1987)

“They were not holding hands, but their shadows were. Sethe looked to her left and all three of them were gliding over the dust holding hands. Maybe he was right. A life.”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Beloved (1987)

“Human life is holy, all of it.”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Beloved (1987)

“Even if the room they rented was smaller than the heifer’s stall and darker than a morning privy, they stayed to look at their number, hear themselves in an audience, feel themselves moving down the street among hundreds of others who moved the way they did, and who, when they spoke, regardless of the accent, treated language like the same intricate, malleable toy designed for their play.”

Toni Morrison book Jazz

Jazz (1991) Ch. 2