Toni Morrison citations

Page 3

“Je ne pleurais pas jamais. Jusqu'à la mort de mon fils.”

“Le soleil de biais coupe les immeubles en deux comme un rasoir. Dans la moitié du haut je vois des visages qui regardent, difficile de dire qui sont les gens, qui l'œuvre des maçons. En bas, c'est l'ombre où a lieu n'importe quel truc blasé : clarinette ou baise, des poings et les voix tristes des femmes. Une ville comme celle-là me fait rêver grand et sentir les choses. Au secours. C'est l'acier brillant qui se balance au-dessus de l'ombre qui fait ça. quand je regarde les rubans d'herbe verte le long du fleuve, les clochers des églises et les entrées cuivre et crème des immeubles résidentiels, je suis forte.”

“L'armistice avait huit ans l'hiver où Violette a dérangé les funérailles, et les anciens combattants de la Septième Avenue portent encore leurs capotes militaires, parce que rien de ce qu'ils peuvent se payer n'est aussi solide ou ne cache aussi bien ce dont ils s'étaient vantés en 1919. Huit ans plus tard, la veille des frasques de Violette, quand la neige arrive, elle reste là où elle tombe sur Lennox et aussi Park Avenue, et attend que les carrioles à chevaux la tassent en livrant du charbon aux chaudières qui refroidissent dans les caves. Dans ces gros immeubles de cinq étages et les étroites maisons en bois qui les séparent, les gens frappent aux portes pour savoir ce dont on a besoin ou qu'on peut donner.”

“Je n'ai jamais vu la vie avec les yeux d'un blanc.”

“A dream is just a nightmare with lipstick.”

“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”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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)”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”