Toni Morrison Quotes - Page 3

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The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.

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

Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

Sifting daylight dissolves the memory, turns it into dust motes floating in light.

The formula for creative writing in high school or college is write what you know.

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

My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren't my children.

Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? The Lion or the Mouse? Poppy or the Snake?

Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.

I have a lot of respect for readers because I'm a reader. That's how I got into writing.

I am in the position of judging people by the best they've ever done rather than the worst.

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

Girl, I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me...my lonely is mine.

As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer.

We're all surrounded by what I call faux language, fake language of commerce, of news media.

Black women have always been friends. I mean, if you didn't have each other you had nothing.

Intimacy is extremely important to me and I want it to be extremely important to the readers.

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

The difference between that which is humane and that which is patriotic is a vital difference.

But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.

Being good to somebody is just like being mean to somebody. Risky. You don't get nothing for it.

I have the wonderful pleasure of finishing the book and closing it. And I don't read them later.

The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one.

If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

I sometimes lose interest in the characters and get much more interested in the trees and animals.

Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.

Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?

Sometimes what I write on the page frightens me, so I feel free when I write, but I don't feel safe.

Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.

My theory is that the world is a difficult place to live in and distraction is the name of the game.

It would be ten years before they saw each other again, and their meeting would be thick with birds.

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

From my point of view, your life is already a miracle of chance waiting for you to shape its destiny.

Misery don't call ahead. That's why you have to stay awake - otherwise it just walks on in your door.

I always start out with an idea, even a boring idea, that becomes a question I don't have answers to.

I wish I’d a knowed more people. I would of loved ‘em all. If I’d a knowed more, I would a loved more

Nobody loved her and she wouldn’t have liked it if they had, she considered love a serious disability.

What's interesting about writing is the invention, the creative thing. Writing about myself is a yawn.

Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

Books ARE a form of political action. Books are knowledge. Books are reflection. Books change your mind.

It was my father who could do no wrong. So I didn't think of it as, oh, look, my father's a violent man.

I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer - its dust and lowering skies.

Perhaps that's what all human relationships boiled down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?

Let your face speak what's in your heart. When my kids walk in the room my face says I'm glad to see them.

If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, you must be the one to write it.

Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.

We read about how Ajax and Achilles will die for each other, but very little about the friendship of women.

If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up.

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