Toni Morrison Quotes

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

Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers.

Somebody has to take responsibility for being a leader.

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

The loneliest woman in the world is the woman without a close woman friend.

Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can't nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.

Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face; you are me.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I like marriage. The idea.

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.

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

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

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