If you can't count, they can cheat you. If you can't read, they can beat you. — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
Please don't settle for happiness. It's not good enough. Of course you deserve it, but if that's all you have in mind… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
I can't explain inspiration. A writer is either compelled to write or not. And if I waited for inspiration I wouldn't really… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
Sometimes Joyce is hilarious. I read Finnegans Wake after graduate school and I had the great good fortune of reading it without… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this,… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
Sometimes the names were humiliating, deliberately so. Somebody would pick out your flaw. If you were little, they would call you Shorty.… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
Black women have always been friends. I mean, if you didn't have each other you had nothing. — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
When you first start writing-and I think it's true for a lot of beginning writers-you're scared to death that if you don't… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And white people… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
I have difficulties with contemporary language. Big difficulties. I counted, you know, something like 160 words have disappeared from the English language… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
My metaphor is that evil always has a top hat and a cape, and goodness is over there in the corner. For… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
“If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic....Authors… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
If you take racism away from certain people - I mean, vitriolic racism as well as the sort of social racist -… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
Some literature is knowledge, some is just data. But if I can get a "happy" ending - which is when for the… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
All the time, I'm afraid the thing that happened that made it all right for my mother to kill my sister could… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic. — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
Perhaps that's what all human relationships boiled down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it? — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
There, in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
If you can't count, they can cheat you. If you can't read, they can beat you. — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
“You looked at them and wondered why the were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
All she saw, down in the cellar well beneath the stoop, was a light yellow feather with a tip of green. And she had… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end.… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
“Hate does that. Burns off everything but itself, so whatever your grievance is, your face looks just like your enemy's.” — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
“You know how a star is supposed to twinkle? We say twinkle because that is how it looks, but when a star feels itself,… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
