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Home: Toni Morrison Quotes

Toni Morrison Quotes

Novelist
Born On
1931-02-18
Died On
2019-08-05
Birth Place
Lorain, Ohio
Death Place
New York City
Birth Sign
aquarius
Father
George Wofford
Mother
Ramah
Spouse
Harold Morrison
Nationality
American
Education
Howard University, Cornell University
Writers, Novelists

Toni Morrison, known for her novel, ‘The Bluest Eye’, which is about a black girl, who was made to feel so unattractive that all she wanted at her tender age was to be the owner of beautiful blue eyes. The book is set at a time when black wasn't beautiful. However, Morrison never harbored such inferiority complex and the book was more based on the desire of her classmate, who was then just 12-years-old. For Toni, who was born Chloe Wofford, the thought seemed ‘grotesquely self-loathing’. Since childhood, Morrison’s parents had taught her to respect herself for who she was. She lived in a neighborhood where, irrespective of color, all residents were poor and went to the same educational institution.

The matchless writer says that her attitude can be attributed partly to her mother—the kind of woman “who tore eviction notices off the door." On one occasion, when the family was surviving on relief, they received a bag of food that had insects inside. That very day, Morrison’s mother wrote to Franklin Roosevelt complaining about the incident, and the President sent the woman responsible for it, to their house.

The novelist also admires her father who taught her to stand up for herself when someone else humiliated her. One such day, when Toni had landed herself a job as a house maid, she came home in tears after being shouted at by her employer. While her mother asked her to leave the job, her father simply said, “Go to work, get your money and come home. You don't live there.” That taught this strong-willed writer a lesson that remained ingrained forever.

As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.

Power Trust
Toni Morrison

When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.

Pain Words
Toni Morrison

She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.

Friendship Good
Toni Morrison

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

Toni Morrison

If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.

Toni Morrison

Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.

Love
Toni Morrison

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

Toni Morrison

There is really nothing more to say-except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.

Nothing
Toni Morrison

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

Nature Water Memory
Toni Morrison

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

Life Language
Toni Morrison

I get angry about things, then go on and work.

Anger Work
Toni Morrison

In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.

Country
Toni Morrison

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.

Toni Morrison

Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.

Toni Morrison

No one ever talks about the moment you found that you were white. Or the moment you found out you were black. That's a profound revelation. The minute you find that out, something happens. You have to renegotiate everything.

Toni Morrison

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.

Ability Power
Toni Morrison

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.

Toni Morrison

I like marriage. The idea.

Funny
Toni Morrison

Make a difference about something other than yourselves.

Toni Morrison

At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.

Life Beauty World
Toni Morrison

You marvel at the economy and this choice of words. How many ways can you describe the sky and the moon? After Sylvia Plath, what can you say?

Words Moon
Toni Morrison

Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich inherit it. I don't mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network.

Money People
Toni Morrison

I'm always annoyed about why black people have to bear the brunt of everybody else's contempt. If we are not totally understanding and smiling, suddenly we're demons.

People
Toni Morrison

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

Art
Toni Morrison

I merged those two words, black and feminist, because I was surrounded by black women who were very tough and and who always assumed they had to work and rear children and manage homes.

Women Work
Toni Morrison

There is nothing of any consequence in education, in the economy, in city planning, in social policy that does not concern black people.

People Education
Toni Morrison

I always looked upon the acts of racist exclusion, or insult, as pitiable, from the other person. I never absorbed that. I always thought that there was something deficient about such people.

People
Toni Morrison

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.

Equality Women
Toni Morrison

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

World
Toni Morrison

A lot of black people believe that Jews in this country have become white. They behave like white people rather than Jewish people.

People Country
Toni Morrison

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

Love People
Toni Morrison

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

People Country Wars
Toni Morrison

I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can't teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort.

Talent Vision
Toni Morrison

I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.

Toni Morrison

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.

Money
Toni Morrison

You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone.

Community
Toni Morrison

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.

Family
Toni Morrison

Somebody has to take responsibility for being a leader.

Responsibility
Toni Morrison

Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.

People Violence
Toni Morrison

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

People Work
Toni Morrison

For a long time I was convinced that the conflict between Jewish people and black people in this country was a media event.

People Country Time
Toni Morrison

One of my kids was born in 1968. There were going to be political difficulties, but they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to.

Toni Morrison

The unflattering reviews are painful for short periods of time; the badly written ones are deeply, deeply insulting. That reviewer took no time to really read the book.

Short Time
Toni Morrison

The body is ready to have babies. Nature wants it done then, when the body can handle it, not after 40, when the income can handle it.

Nature Body
Toni Morrison

I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway.

Character Problems Thinking
Toni Morrison

In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it's nothing else but color.

Nothing
Toni Morrison

Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth.

People Earth
Toni Morrison

Schools must stop being holding pens to keep energetic young people off the job market and off the streets. We stretch puberty out a long, long time.

People Time
Toni Morrison

It's been mentioned or suggested that Paradise will not be well studied, because it's about this unimportant intellectual topic, which is religion.

Toni Morrison

Nelson Mandela is, for me, the single statesman in the world. The single statesman, in that literal sense, who is not solving all his problems with guns. It's truly unbelievable.

Problems World
Toni Morrison

Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers.

Toni Morrison

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