People Quotes by Toni Morrison

I am in the position of judging people by the best they've ever done rather than the worst.

— Toni Morrison

Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth.

— Toni Morrison

My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren't my children.

— Toni Morrison

“People who die bad don't stay in the ground.”

— Toni Morrison

What I'm doing ain't about hating White people. It's about loving us.

— Toni Morrison

I don't do the things other people call "play."

— Toni Morrison

Home is memory, home is your history, home is where you work. Some people want to abandon it and become truly local.…

— Toni Morrison

I'm not entangled in shaping my work according to other people's views of how I should have done it.

— Toni Morrison

If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And white people…

— Toni Morrison

A lot of black people believe that Jews in this country have become white. They behave like white people rather than Jewish…

— Toni Morrison

I'm always annoyed about why black people have to bear the brunt of everybody else's contempt. If we are not totally understanding…

— Toni Morrison

All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.

— Toni Morrison

Anything I have ever learned of any consequence, I have learned from Black people. I have never been bored by any Black…

— Toni Morrison

In Ohio seasons are theatrical. Each one enters like a prima donna, convinced its performance is the reason the world has people…

— Toni Morrison

People say to write about what you know. I'm here to tell you, no one wants to read that, cos you don't…

— Toni Morrison

The race thing is sort of a misnomer. It's just the human race, right? That's it. The rest of it, and racism,…

— Toni Morrison

Listen, baby, people do funny things. Specially us. The cards are stacked against us and just trying to stay in the game,…

— Toni Morrison

I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female…

— Toni Morrison

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

In my mother's church, everybody read the Bible and it was mostly about music. My mother had the most beautiful voice I…

— Toni Morrison

This is really skin privilege, the ranking of color in terms of its closeness to white people or white-skinned people and its…

— Toni Morrison

Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people…

— Toni Morrison

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

“Do they still call it infatuation? That magic ax that chops away the world in one blow, leaving only the couple standing…

— Toni Morrison

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

Sometimes Joyce is hilarious. I read Finnegans Wake after graduate school and I had the great good fortune of reading it without…

— Toni Morrison

Alice thought, No. It wasn't the War and the disgruntled veterans; it wasn't the droves and droves of colored people flocking to…

— Toni Morrison

She left me the way people leave a hotel room. A hotel room is a place to be when you are doing…

— Toni Morrison

There, in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word…

— Toni Morrison

How soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like forever. As…

— Toni Morrison

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

I wish I’d a knowed more people. I would of loved ‘em all. If I’d a knowed more, I would a loved…

— Toni Morrison

Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.

— Toni Morrison

Schools must stop being holding pens to keep energetic young people off the job market and off the streets. We stretch puberty…

— Toni Morrison

For a long time I was convinced that the conflict between Jewish people and black people in this country was a media…

— Toni Morrison

I couldn't bear to have people mispronounce my name. But the person I was was this person who was called Chloe.

— Toni Morrison

Movements toward freedom and the self-respect that comes from something other than what people think is their most important feature.

— Toni Morrison

There is nothing of any consequence in education, in the economy, in city planning, in social policy that does not concern black…

— Toni Morrison

American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen.

— Toni Morrison

I'm losing the definition now of politics. I sort of don't know what that is anymore. People say politically correct, I don't…

— Toni Morrison