Toni Morrison
If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down.Collection: Giving Up
There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.Collection: Writing
The function of freedom is to free someone else.Collection: Love
I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge - even wisdom. Like art.Collection: Art
I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.Collection: Jobs
There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race - scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct... it has a social function, racism.Collection: Race
From my point of view, your life is already a miracle of chance waiting for you to shape its destiny.Collection: Destiny
I want to discourage you from choosing anything or making any decision simply because it is safe. Things of value seldom areCollection: Decision
You are your own stories and therefore free to imagine and experience what it means to be human... And although you don't have complete control over the narrative - no author does, I can tell you - you could nevertheless create it.Collection: Inspirational
Books ARE a form of political action. Books are knowledge. Books are reflection. Books change your mind.Collection: Book
All important things are hard.Collection: Important
A friend gathers all the pieces and gives them back in the right order.Collection: Order
Your life is already artful-waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.Collection: Art
It's important, therefore, to know who the real enemy is, and to know the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn't shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Someone says you have no art so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.Collection: Art
You are your best thingCollection: Inspiring
Racism will disappear when it's no longer profitable, and no longer psychologically useful. And when that happens, it'll be gone. But at the moment, people make a lot of money off of it, pro and con.Collection: Racism
Don’t beg anybody for anything, especially love.Collection: Love
Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.Collection: Definitions
Let your face speak what's in your heart.Collection: Heart
The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one.Collection: Thinking
In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent.Collection: Artist
Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It's not having no responsibilitie s; it's choosing the ones you want.Collection: Responsibility
If you take racism away from certain people - I mean, vitriolic racism as well as the sort of social racist - if you take that away, they may have to face something really terrible, misery, self-misery, and deep pain about who they are.Collection: Pain
Black women are the touchstone by which all that is human can be measured.Collection: Black
guileless and without vanity,we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our own skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness.Collection: Vanity
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.Collection: Eye
you got two feet, Sethe, not four." he said, and right then a forest sprang up between them; tactless and quiet.Collection: Two
The habit of getting up early, which I had formed when the children were young, now became my choice. I am not very bright or very witty or very inventive after the sun goes down.Collection: Witty
I lived in a little working-class town that had no black neighborhoods at all - one high school. We all played together. Everybody was either somebody from the South or an immigrant from East Europe or from Mexico. And there was one church, and there were four elementary schools. And we were all, pretty much until the end of the war, very, very poor.Collection: War
The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.Collection: Evil
But her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day.Collection: Past
I think being an editor really helped me take other people's notes on my writing. I'd get a note like 'It's too wet' or 'The first couple chapters are good, but then the rest of the pages were so wet that they were completely illegible' or 'Did you dip this in Sprite? This smells like Sprite. Why would you dip your novel in Sprite?' And instead of pushing back, I'd listen. That's an incredibly important skill for a young writer to have.Collection: Couple
...when the little boy discovered, at four, the same thing Mr. Smith had learned earlier -- that only birds and planes could fly -- he lost all interest in himself.Collection: Boys
The children - I call them children when they're under 18 - are hungry for that love. The drugs are just a sleep that you can't even wake up from, because you might remember what you did when you were there. There's no place for them - there should be a rehabilitation center on every corner, along with McDonald's and the banks. This is serious business. The waiting lists are incredible. I mean, it's terrible. It's really terrible.Collection: Children
Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? The Lion or the Mouse? Poppy or the Snake?Collection: Games
The formula for creative writing in high school or college is write what you know. And I said they don't know nothing. Imagine something. Do you know what it's like to be a Madame in Paris, when you're too old to have any clients. No, you don't. I don't either. Write about it.Collection: Writing
Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.Collection: Names
Political doesn't necessarily mean you have an agenda.Collection: Mean
...she needed to confirm its presence. Like the keeper of the lighthouse and the prisoner, she regarded it as a mooring, a checkpoint, some stable visual object that assured her that the world was still there; that this was like and not a dream. That she was alive somewhere, inside, which she acknowledged to be true only because a thing she knew intimately was out there, outside of herself.Collection: Dream
The isolation, the separateness, is always a part of any utopia.Collection: Isolation
The idea of a wanton woman is something I have inserted into almost all of my books. An outlaw figure who is disallowed in the community because of her imagination or activity or status - that kind of anarchic figure has always fascinated me. And the benefits they bring with them, in spite of the fact that they are either dismissed or upbraided - something about their presence is constructive in the long run.Collection: Running
This is the time for every artist in every genre to do what he or she does loudly and consistently. It doesn't matter to me what your position is. You've got to keep asserting the complexity and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it, and the facets of it. This is about being a complex human being in the world, not about finding a villain. This is no time for anything else than the best that you've got.Collection: Artist
Everything depends on knowing how much,” she said, and “Good is knowing when to stop.Collection: Knowing
I think there's data, and then there's information that comes from data, and then there's knowledge that comes from information. And then, after knowledge, there is wisdom. I am interested in how to get from data to wisdom.Collection: Thinking
Intimacy is extremely important to me and I want it to be extremely important to the readers.Collection: Important
Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.Collection: Black
Liberation means you don't have to be silenced.Collection: Mean
If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And white people have a very, very serious problem.Collection: White
I am a writer and my faith in the world of art is intense, but not irrational, nor naïve - because art takes us and makes us take a journey beyond price, beyond cost, into bearing witness to the world as it is and as it should be. Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.Collection: Art