Toni Morrison
Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.Collection: Art
Anger ... it's a paralyzing emotion ... you can't get anything done. People sort of think it's an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling — I don't think it's any of that — it's helpless ... it's absence of control — and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers ... and anger doesn't provide any of that — I have no use for it whatsoever." [Interview with CBS radio host Don Swaim, September 15, 1987.]Collection: Anger
I dream a dream that dreams back at me.Collection: Dream
When a child walks in the room, your child or anybody else’s child, do your eyes light up? That’s what they’re looking for.Collection: Children
Laughter is more serious than tears.Collection: Laughter
Sometimes what I write on the page frightens me, so I feel free when I write, but I don't feel safe.Collection: Writing
From my point of view, which is that of a storyteller, I see your life as something artful, waiting, just waiting and ready for you to make it art.Collection: Inspirational
Love is never any better than the lover.Collection: Love Is
Misery don't call ahead. That's why you have to stay awake - otherwise it just walks on in your door.Collection: Doors
Something that is loved is never lost.Collection: Lost
At some point in life, the world's beauty becomes enough.Collection: Beauty
I don't know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.Collection: Responsibility
I think one of the reasons I'm so thrilled with writing is because it is an act of reading for me at the same time, which is why my revisions are so sustained.Collection: Reading
The seeds of destruction lie in the definition of "chosen-ness" and can easily blossom into bigotry. It's not inevitable but it needs constant care to avoid.Collection: Lying
When I went into the publishing industry, many women talked about the difficulty they had in persuading their families to let them go to college. They educated the boys, and the girls had to struggle.Collection: Girl
What's interesting about writing is the invention, the creative thing. Writing about myself is a yawn.Collection: Writing
Womanists is what black feminists used to call themselves. Very much so. They were not the same thing. And also the relationship with men. Historically, black women have always sheltered their men because they were out there, and they were the ones that were most likely to be killed.Collection: Men
Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.Collection: Creating
We never shape the world . . . the world shapes us.Collection: World
The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.Collection: Beautiful
You free. Nothing and nobody is obliged to save you but you.Collection: Obliged
There is an incredible amount of magic and feistiness in black men that nobody has been able to wipe out. But everybody has tried.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Heart
I always know the ending; that's where I start.Collection: Knows
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.Collection: Girl
What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.Collection: Thinking
In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can't take positions that are closed. Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book -- leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity.Collection: Book
There is no civilization that did not begin with art, Whether it was drawing a line in the sand, painting a cave or dancing.Collection: Art
And I am all the things I have ever loved: scuppernong wine, cool baptisms in silent water, dream books and number playing.Collection: Dream
There's a difference between writing for a living and writing for life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises.... If you write for life, you'll work hard; you'll do what's honest, not what paysCollection: Hard Work
The theme you choose may change or simply elude you, but being your own story means you can always choose the tone. It also means that you can invent the language to say who are you and what you mean.Collection: Inspirational
What I'm doing ain't about hating White people. It's about loving us.Collection: Hate
I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.Collection: Falling In Love
What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?Collection: Fear
Language can never 'pin down' slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity, is in its reach toward the ineffable.Collection: War
Beginning 'Beloved' with numerals rather than spelled out numbers, it was my intention to give the house an identity separate from the street or even the city.Collection: Cities
When I write, I don't translate for white readers.... Dostoevski wrote for a Russian audience, but we're able to read him. If I'm specific, and I don't overexplain, then anyone can overhear me.Collection: Writing
Never did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed him ... His subconscious knew what his min did not guess-that hating them would have consumed him, burned him up like a piece of soft coal, leaving only flakes of ash and a question mark of smoke.Collection: Hate
...the City is what they want it to be: thriftless, warm, scary and full of amiable strangers. No wonder they forget pebbly creeks and when they do not forget the sky completely think of it as a tiny piece of information about the time of day or night.Collection: Night
A man ain't nothing but a man. But a son? Well, now, that's somebody.Collection: Son
I'm just trying to look at something without blinking, to see what it is like, or it could have been like, and how that had something to do with the way we live now. Novels are always inquiries for me.Collection: Trying
My first-born. All I can remember of her is how she loved the burned bottom of bread. Can you beat that? Eight children and that's all I remember.Collection: Children
I sometimes lose interest in the characters and get much more interested in the trees and animals.Collection: Character
When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world?Collection: Differences
A son ain't what a woman say. A son is what a man do.Collection: Son
Make a difference, does it? You stay the night here snake get you.Collection: Night
He wants to put his story next to hers.Collection: Stories
Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.Collection: Life