Quotes By Toni Morrison

One of my kids was born in 1968. There were going to be political difficulties, but they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to.

If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.

Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.

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

I merged those two words, black and feminist, because I was surrounded by black women who were very tough and and who always assumed they had to work and rear children and manage homes.

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

The body is ready to have babies. Nature wants it done then, when the body can handle it, not after 40, when the income can handle it.

Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.

At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.

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

When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.

No one ever talks about the moment you found that you were white. Or the moment you found out you were black. That's a profound revelation. The minute you find that out, something happens. You have to renegotiate everything.

As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.

I like marriage. The idea.

I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway.

Somebody has to take responsibility for being a leader.

Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

The unflattering reviews are painful for short periods of time; the badly written ones are deeply, deeply insulting. That reviewer took no time to really read the book.

There is really nothing more to say-except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.

Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

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

If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers.

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

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

I don't think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they're black or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money. That's what we're upset about.

Nelson Mandela is, for me, the single statesman in the world. The single statesman, in that literal sense, who is not solving all his problems with guns. It's truly unbelievable.

If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.