Toni Morrison Quotes

318 quotes in 3876 categories

• Grown don't mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown. In my heart it don't mean a…
• Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are…
• Liberation means you don't have to be silenced.
• Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face; you are me.
• Passion is never enough; neither is skill.
• There is an incredible amount of magic and feistiness in black men that nobody has been able to wipe out. But everybody has tried.
• The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one.
• Being able to laugh got me through.
• Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand…
• Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the…
• 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…
• Life that crawled, life that slunk and crept and never closed its eyes. Life that burrowed and scurried, and life so still it was indistinguishable…
• I type in one place, but I write all over the house.
• I don't wait to be struck by lightning and I don't need certain slants of light in order to be able to write.
• I don't want you to write about what you know, because you don't know anything. I don't want to hear about your boyfriend or your…
• 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 get that sentence…
• Usually I try to be there by six. Everything has been taken off the walls so that there's nothing to arrest my sight. On the…
• 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 sorry.' People say…
• I don't know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands.…
• Listen up. Let me tell you something. A man ain’t a goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to…

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