Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich inherit it. I don't mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
For a long time I was convinced that the conflict between Jewish people and black people in this country was a media… — 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
Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth. — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
I am in the position of judging people by the best they've ever done rather than the worst. — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
“Do they still call it infatuation? That magic ax that chops away the world in one blow, leaving only the couple standing… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
Two parents can't raise a child any more than one. You need a whole community - everybody - to raise a child.… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
I'm not entangled in shaping my work according to other people's views of how I should have done it. — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
What do you say? There really are no words for that. There really aren't. Somebody tries to say, 'I'm sorry, I'm so… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
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… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war. — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
Anything I have ever learned of any consequence, I have learned from Black people. I have never been bored by any Black… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen. — 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
All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in. — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
Black people's music is in a class by itself and always has been. There's nothing like it. The reason for that is… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
Only her tight, tight eyes were left. They were always left...They were everything. Everything was there, in them...Thrown, in this way, into… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
There is nothing of any consequence in education, in the economy, in city planning, in social policy that does not concern black… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
It's always seemed to me that black people's grace has been with what they do with language. In Lorrain, Ohio, when I… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
I don't work. I keep telling people I'm unemployed. And I don't wash dishes, and I don't wash clothes, and I don't… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
Schools must stop being holding pens to keep energetic young people off the job market and off the streets. We stretch puberty… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
Listen, baby, people do funny things. Specially us. The cards are stacked against us and just trying to stay in the game,… — 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
