Toni Morrison citations

Page 4

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“You been gone too long, Sula.

Not too long, but maybe too far.”

“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.”

“Love is divine only and difficult always.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“What you do to children matters. And they might never forget.”

“For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction.”

“I'm not entangled in shaping my work according to other people's views of how I should have done it.”

“the loss pressed down on her chest and came up into her throat. it was a fine cry -- loud and long -- but it had no bottom and no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.”

“The real hell of Hell is that it is forever.' Sula said that. She said doing anything forever and ever was hell.”

“When I write, I don't translate for white readers…. Dostoevski wrote for a Russian audience, but we're able to read him. If I'm specific, and I don't overexplain, then anyone can overhear me.”

“Every sentence, every word, was new to them and they listened to what he said like bright-eyed ravens, trembling in their eagerness to catch & interpret every sound in the universe.”