Explore Most Famous and Inspiring Toni Morrison Quotes
01) ”What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?”
02) ”The function of freedom is to free someone else.”
03) ”Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.”
04) ”Love is never any better than the lover.”
05) ”You are your best thing.”
06) ”Anger … it’s a paralyzing emotion … you can’t get anything done.”
07) Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.
08) 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.
09) Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
10) You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.
11) If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.
12) ”Don’t ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it.”
13) ”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 of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye.”
14) ”Which was what love was: unmotivated respect.”
15) ”Do they still call it infatuation? That magic ax that chops away the world in one blow, leaving only the couple standing there trembling? Whatever they call it, it leaps over anything, takes the biggest chair, the largest slice, rules the ground wherever it walks, from a mansion to a swamp, and its selfishness is its beauty…. People with no imagination feed it with sex—the clown of love. They don’t know the real kinds, the better kinds, where losses are cut and everybody benefits. It takes a certain intelligence to love like that—softly, without props.”
16) ”Whatever happens, whether you get rich or stay poor, ruin your health or live to old age, you always end up back where you started: hungry for the one thing everybody loses—young loving.”
17) ”More than fear of loving bears or birds bigger than cows, I fear pathless nights. How, I wonder, can I find you in the dark?”
18) ”Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God. You do not deserve love regardless of the suffering you have endured. You do not deserve love because somebody did you wrong. You do not deserve love just because you want it. You can only earn—by practice and careful contemplations—the right to express it and you have to learn how to accept it.”
19) ”It’s not about choosing somebody over her. It’s about making space for somebody along with her.”
20) ”I’ll tell you a real one. You got anything left to you to love, anything at all, do it.”
21) ”It was lovely. Not to be stared at, not seen, but being pulled into view by the interested, uncritical eyes of the other.”
22) ”You can’t own a human being. You can’t lose what you don’t own. Suppose you did own him. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that? Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door? You don’t, do you? And neither does he. You’re turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can’t value you more than you value yourself.”
23) ”Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.”
24) ”So this is what insanity is. Not goofy behavior, but watching a sudden change in the world you used to know.”
25) ”Like friendship, hatred needed more than physical intimacy; it wanted creativity and hard work to sustain itself.”
26) ”When fear rules, obedience is the only survival choice.”
27) ”She was fierce in the presence of death, heroic even, as she was at no other time. Its threat gave her direction, clarity, audacity.”
28) ”The visionary language of the doomed reaches heights of linguistic ardor with which language of the blessed and saved cannot compete.”
29) ”Why not? I can be miserable if I want to. You don’t need to try and make it go away. It shouldn’t go away. It’s just as sad as it ought to be and I’m not going to hide from what’s true just because it hurts.”
30) ”The human body is robust. It can gather strength when it’s in mortal danger.”
31) ”Hate does that. Burns off everything but itself, so whatever your grievance is, your face looks just like your enemy’s.”
32) ”Misery don’t call ahead. That’s why you have to stay awake—otherwise it just walks on in your door.”
33) ”Listen, baby, people do funny things. Specially us. The cards are stacked against us and just trying to stay in the game, stay alive and in the game, makes us do funny things. Things we can’t help. Things that make us hurt one another. We don’t even know why. But look here, don’t carry it inside and don’t give it to nobody else. Try to understand it, but if you can’t, just forget it and keep yourself strong.”
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34) ”The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.”
35) ”Stop picking around the edges of the world. Take advantage, and if you can’t take advantage, take disadvantage. We live here. On this planet, in this nation, in this county right here. Nowhere else! We got a home in this rock, don’t you see!”
36) ”When good people take you in and treat you good, you ought to try to be good back.”
37) ”What’s the world for you if you can’t make it up the way you want it?”
38) ”Death is a sure thing but life is just as certain. Problem is you can’t know in advance.”
39) ”No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you.”
40) ”He relished never knowing what lay in his path, who might approach with what intention.”
41) ”She did not tell them to clean up their lives, or go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek, or its glory-bound pure. She told them that the only grace they could have is the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they could not have it.”
42) ”You have to be clever to figure out how to be welcoming and defensive at the same time. When to love something and when to quit. If you don’t know how, you can end up out of control or controlled by some outside thing.”
43) ”Everything depends on knowing how much… Good is knowing when to stop.”
44) ”We must do all we can to imagine the Other before we presume to solve the problems work and life demand of us.”
45) ”How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.”
46) ”We never shape the world… the world shapes us.”
47) ”You couldn’t learn age, but adulthood was there for all.”
48) ”Today is always here… Tomorrow, never.”
49) ”Correct what you can; learn from what you can’t.”
50) ”Being good to somebody is just like being mean to somebody. Risky. You don’t get nothing for it.”
51) ”But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.”
52) ”Inviting compassion into the bloodstream of an institution’s agenda or a scholar’s purpose is more than productive, more than civilizing, more than ethical, more than humane; it’s humanizing.”
53) ”I am suggesting that we pay as much attention to our nurturing sensibilities as to our ambition. You are moving in the direction of freedom, and the function of freedom is to free somebody else. You are moving toward self-fulfillment, and the consequences of that fulfillment should be to discover that there is something just as important as you are.”
54) ”If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.”
55) ”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.”
56) ”Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”
57) ”Look to yourself. You free. Nothing and nobody is obliged to save you but you… Somewhere inside you is that free person I’m talking about. Locate her and let her do some good in the world.”
58) ”Don’t let anybody, anybody convince you this is the way the world is and therefore must be. It must be the way it ought to be.”
59) ”Our past is bleak. Our future dim. But I am not reasonable. A reasonable man adjusts to his environment. An unreasonable man does not. All progress, therefore, depends on the unreasonable man. I prefer not to adjust to my environment. I refuse the prison of ‘I’ and choose the open spaces of ‘we.”
60) ”We cannot be optimistic, but we can be clear. We can identify the enemy. We can begin by asking ourselves what it is right rather than what is expedient. Know the difference between fever and the disease. Between racism and greed. We can be clear and we can be careful. Careful to avoid the imprisonment of the mind, the spirit, and the will of ourselves and those among whom we live. We can be careful of tolerating second-rate goals and secondhand ideas.”
61) ”I suspect that a nonracist, nonsexist, educating press is as profitable as one that is not. I suspect that clarification of difficult issues is just as entertaining as obscuring and reducing them is. But it will take more than an effort of the will to make such a press profitable; it will take imagination, invention, and a strong sense of responsibility and accountability.”
62) ”The media spectacle must not continue to direct its attention to the manufacture of consent, rather than debate with more than two sides, to the reinforcement of untruths, and a review of what else there is to buy.”
63) ”Her color is a cross she will always carry.”
64) ”Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another.”
65) ”Language, when it finally comes, has the vigor of a felon pardoned after twenty-one years on hold. Sudden, raw, stripped to its underwear.”
66) ”“Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel, that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights, or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination.”
67) ”All narrative begins for me as listening. When I read, I listen. When I write, I listen—for silence, inflection, rhythm, rest.”
68) ”The novel, I believe, allows, encourages ways to experience the public—in time, with affect, in a communal space, with other people (characters), and in language that insists on individual participation. It also tries to illuminate and recover the relationship between literature and public life.”
69) ”Her passions were narrow but deep.”
70) ”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.”
71) ”I don’t think many people appreciate silence or realize that it is as close to music as you can get.”
72) ”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. No record of it needs to be kept and you don’t need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens—that letting go—you let go because you can.”
73) ”A writer’s life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.”
74) ”Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.”
75) ”Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings; had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.”
76) ”I need to use everything—sound, image, performance—to get at the full meaning of the story.”
77) ”Art is not mere entertainment or decoration, it has meaning, and we both want and need to fathom that meaning—not fear, dismiss, or construct superficial responses told to us by authorities.”
78) ”What one puts up with in a friendship is determined by the emotional value of the relationship.”
79) ”What you do to children matters. And they might never forget.”
80) ”Perhaps that’s what all human relationships boil down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?”
81) ”Grown don’t mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What’s that suppose to mean? In my heart it don’t mean a thing.”
82) ”The best thing she was, was her children.”
83) ”It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.”
84) ”A daughter is a woman that cares about where she come from and takes care of them that took care of her.”
85) ”Each member of the family in his own cell of consciousness, each making his own patchwork quilt of reality—collecting fragments of experience here, pieces of information there. From the tiny impressions gleaned from one another, they created a sense of belonging and tried to make do with the way they found each other.”
86) ”She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.”
87) ”What a man leaves behind is what a man is.”
88) ”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’.”
