What's the world for you if you can't make it up the way you want it? — 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
The enemy is not men. The enemy is the concept of patriarchy, the concept of patriarchy as the way to run the… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
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… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
When I'm not creating or focusing on something I can imagine or invent, I think I go back over my life -… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
Word-work is sublime... because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference-the way in which we are… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
Writing is really a way of thinking--not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet. — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
I'm just trying to look at something without blinking, to see what it is like, or it could have been like, and… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
Sex is difficult to write about because it's just not sexy enough. The only way to write about it is not to… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
But Jude,' she would say, 'you knew me. All those days and years, Jude, you knew me. My ways and my hands… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
Did you ever see the way the clouds love a mountain? They circle all around it; sometimes you can't even see the… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
Each member of the family in his own cell of consciousness, each making his own patchwork quilt of reality - collecting fragments… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
And talking about dark! You think dark is just one color, but it ain't. There're five or six kinds of black. Some… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
She left me the way people leave a hotel room. A hotel room is a place to be when you are doing… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
In a way, her strangeness, her naiveté, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of an idle… — 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
I laughed but before I could agree with the hairdressers that she was crazy, she said, 'What's the world for if you… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
It was not death or dying that frightened him, but the unexpectedness of both. In sorting it all out, he hit on… — 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
Perhaps that's what all human relationships boiled down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it? — Toni Morrison Copy Share
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
If you can't count, they can cheat you. If you can't read, they can beat you. — Toni Morrison Copy Share
“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
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
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
“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
“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
My father saw two black men lynched on his street in Cartersville, as a child. And I think seeing two black businessmen - not… — Toni Morrison Copy Share
“She was fierce in the presence of death, heroic even, as she was at no other time. Its threat gave her direction, clarity, audacity.” — Toni Morrison Copy Share
