Toni Morrison
There are some very powerful contributions to knowledge in the scientific world or the legal world, but art is singular. That's why every dictator gets rid of the artists first. They burn the books and execute the artists first. Then they get on with whatever else they're interested in. Art might do something. It's dangerous.Collection: Art
I am a moralist. I worry.Collection: Worry
All art is knowing when to stop.Collection: Art
My world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.Collection: History
I have difficulties with contemporary language. Big difficulties. I counted, you know, something like 160 words have disappeared from the English language because of the use of the word "like." "I'm like, he's like" - not "thought," not "as if ."Collection: Use
An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.Collection: Fall
You looking good." "Devil's confusion. He lets me look good long as I feel bad.Collection: Long
The language must be careful and must appear effortless. It must not sweat. It must suggest and be provocative at the same time.Collection: Sweat
He leans over and takes her hand. With the other he touches her face. ‘You your best thing, Sethe. You are.’ His holding fingers are holding hers. ‘Me? Me?Collection: Hands
If he looked into her face, he would see those haunted, loving eyes. The hauntedness would irritate him - the love would move him to fury. How dare she love him? Hadn't she any sense at all? What was he supposed to do about that? Return it? How? What could his calloused hands produce to make her smile? What of his knowledge of the world and of life could be useful to her? What could his heavy arms and befuddled brain accomplish that would earn him his own respect, that would in turn allow him to accept her love?Collection: Moving
When a man angers you, he conquers you.Collection: Men
A dead hydrangea is as intricate and lovely as one in bloom. Bleak sky is as seductive as sunshine, miniature orange trees without blossom or fruit are not defective; they are that.Collection: Sunshine
Evil is so seductive. It needs to grind you up and make you its slave.Collection: Evil
To get to a place where you could love anything you chose--not to need permission for desire--well now _that_ was freedom.Collection: Life
Love is divine only and difficult always.Collection: Love Is
Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?Collection: Beloved
In Tar Baby, the classic concept of the individual with a solid, coherent identity is eschewed for a model of identity which sees the individual as a kaleidoscope of heterogeneous impulses and desires, constructed from multiple forms of interaction with the world as a play of difference that cannot be completely comprehended.Collection: Baby
The race thing is sort of a misnomer. It's just the human race, right? That's it. The rest of it, and racism, is socially constructed. Nobody is born racist, no one. What happens is other things that are usually based on power, money, feeling good about yourself, or bad about yourself, those things play into hating other people for whatever reason.Collection: Hate
You rely on a sentence to say more than the denotation and the connotation; you revel in the smoke that the words send up.Collection: Connotation
Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.Collection: Reality
I can't explain inspiration. A writer is either compelled to write or not. And if I waited for inspiration I wouldn't really be a writer.Collection: Inspiration
True the Black woman did the housework, the drudgery; true, she reared the children, often alone, but she did all of that while occupying a place on the job market, a place her mate could not get or which his pride would not let him accept.And she had nothing to fall back on: not maleness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality she may very well have invented herself.Collection: Jobs
A dream is just a nightmare with lipstick.Collection: Dream
I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer - its dust and lowering skies.Collection: Summer
The writing is - I'm free of pain. It's the place where I live; it's where I have control; it's where nobody tells me what to do; it's where my imagination is fecund and I am really at my best. Nothing matters more in the world or in my body or anywhere when I'm writing.Collection: Pain
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.Collection: Beautiful
Two parents can't raise a child any more than one. You need a whole community - everybody - to raise a child. And the little nuclear family is a paradigm that just doesn't work. It doesn't work for white people or for black people. Why are we hanging onto it, I don't know. It isolates people into little units - people need a larger unit.Collection: Family
Passion is never enough; neither is skill.Collection: Passion
There's a contract that I make between myself, the author, and the reader. I have to figure out how to give the reader certain powers of recognition, or his own knowledge, his own feelings, but I provide them, so we're working together.Collection: Giving
I'm a writer in the world. I translate the confusion that I might feel, the dread that I know I feel, moving towards some other place, moving away from puny language, from all that dread into some other kind of language.Collection: Moving
She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it's there, because it can't hurt, and because what difference does it make?Collection: Gratitude
We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.Collection: Passion
A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves - a special kind of double.Collection: Sister
Write about something you don't know. And don't be scared, ever.Collection: Writing
I remember a very important lesson that my father gave me when I was twelve or thirteen. He said, "You know, today I welded a perfect seam and I signed my name to it." And I said, "But, Daddy, no one's going to see it!" And he said, "Yeah, but I know it's there." So when I was working in kitchens, I did good work.Collection: Father
How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.Collection: Imagination
We're all surrounded by what I call faux language, fake language of commerce, of news media.Collection: Media
Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face; you are me.Collection: Mom
If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.Collection: Writing
New York is the last true city.Collection: New York
And talking about dark! You think dark is just one color, but it ain't. There're five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some woolly. Some just empty. Some like fingers. And it don't stay still, it moves and changes from one kind of black to another. Saying something is pitch black is like saying something is green. What kind of green? Green like my bottles? Green like a grasshopper? Green like a cucumber, lettuce, or green like the sky is just before it breaks loose to storm? Well, night black is the same way. May as well be a rainbow.Collection: Moving
Being able to laugh got me through.Collection: Laughing
I write the way women have babies. You don't know it's going to be like that. If you did, there's no way you would go through with it.Collection: Baby
It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love ... You can't own a human being.Collection: Love You
The difference between that which is humane and that which is patriotic is a vital difference.Collection: Patriotic
The best part of all, the absolutely most delicious part, is finishing it and then doing it over I rewrite a lot, over and over again, so that it looks like I never did.Collection: Finishing It
It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.Collection: Heartbreak
I laughed but before I could agree with the hairdressers that she was crazy, she said, 'What's the world for if you can't make it up the way you want it?' " 'The way I want it?' " 'Yeah. The way you want it. Don't you want it to be something more than what it is?' " 'What'st eh point? I can't change it.' " 'That's the point. If you don't, it will change you and it'll be your fault cause you let it. I let it. And messed up my life.' " 'Mess it up how?' " 'Forgot it.' " 'Forgot?' " 'Forgot it was mine. My life. I just ran up and down the streets wishing I was somebody else.Collection: Crazy
For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction.Collection: Art