Toni Morrison

Quotes

• “To hold up the mirror of language to a society in fracture, porous with lying and shrill with contempt for meaning, is n...”
• “(How, or in what ways, has Morrison influenced you writing?) Cliff: Enormously. I don't think I could have written this ...”
• “Something's the matter. What's the matter? What's the matter? She asked herself. She didn't know what she looked like an...”
• “It is easily the most empty cliché, the most useless word, and at the same time the most powerful human emotion - becaus...”
• “Darkness or not, she moves rapidly around, reaching, touching cobwebs, cheese, slating shelves, the pallet interfering w...”
• “They killed the flirt whom folks called Life for leading them on. Making them think the next sunrise would be worth it; ...”
• “I was thrilled that my mother is still alive and can share this with me. And I can claim representation in so many areas...”
• “Of course I'm a black writer.... I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin A...”
• “Realism in Morrison's work is blurred. There's a scene in Sula where two little girls accidentally drown a much younger ...”
• “(What do you specifically like in Toni Morrison's works?) MC I particularly liked her first books, The Bluest Eye and Su...”
• “I am Beloved and she is mine. I see her take flowers away from leaves she puts them in a round basket the leaves are not...”
• “How soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like forever. As though ther...”
• “The immigrant artist, to borrow from Toni Morrison's Nobel lecture knows what it is "to live at the edge of towns that c...”
• “Even if the room they rented was smaller than the heifer's stall and darker than a morning privy, they stayed to look at...”
• “The message seems to be that if you're white, you're a user. You can go home. But if you're black, you're a trafficker. ...”
• “To me, the great writers who come from ethnic minorities writing in English come from America. I think the deep, the rea...”
• “It's a tree, Lu. A chokecherry tree. See, here's the trunk - it's red and split wide open, full of sap, and this here's ...”
• “She writes such complicated, interwoven, shocking, comforting, rich internal lives for her characters. She is a master o...”
• “He knew what she was thinking and even though she was wrong - he was not leaving her, wouldn't ever - the thing he had i...”
• “I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house, and nothing in between but the daughter I am holding in my arms. No mor...”
• “The return of Denver's hearing, cut off by an answer she could not bear to hear, cut on by the sound of her dead sister ...”
• “Toni Morrison did make me aware that there are ways to use words, ways that I hadn't been using. I came in by way of pul...”
• “Was there anything so loathsome as a wilfully innocent man? Hardly. An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and the...”
• “I remember a very important lesson that my father gave me when I was twelve or thirteen. He said, "You know, today I wel...”
• “What for? What does a sixty-odd-year-old slavewoman who walks like a three-legged dog need freedom for? And when she ste...”
• “Toni Morrison did create her own world of English. She made a space in novel form that would allow her and her people an...”
• “Black women write differently from white women. This is the most marked difference of all those combinations of black an...”
• “A further measure of the importance of the feminism of women of color was the tremendous efflorescence in their fiction....”
• “Of course Toni Morrison's work has been important to me, and that of Maxine Hong Kingston. Both women have encouraged me...”
• “I think women dwell quite a bit on the duress under which they work, on how hard it is just to do it at all. We are trad...”
• “Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what ...”
• “I am not dead I sit the sun closes my eyes when I open them I see the face I lost Sethe's is the face that left me Sethe...”
• “(Whom do you consider your literary heroes?) Toni Morrison, Grace Paley, Emily Brontë, Ray Bradbury, all for different r...”
• “Your work, my goodness, the work is sublime. And we do not just read it, we experience it. You gave us both lullabies an...”
• “They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time. No need to hurry out here. They are seventeen m...”
• “Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name. Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be ...”
• “People keep saying, 'We need to have a conversation about race'. This is the conversation. I want to see a cop shoot a w...”
• “Ms. Morrison is a person who gives you her full attention; who wants, even in the context of an interview, to have a con...”
• “Word-work is sublime... because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference - t...”
• “My ambition, that toward which I aspire to write, has long been guided by Toni Morrison, Beloved, and through her words,...”
• “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 margin. What it is to hav...”
• “I see the dark face that is going to smile at me it is my dark face that is going to smile at me the iron circle is arou...”
• “Could she sing? (Was it nice to hear when she did?) Was she pretty? Was she a good friend? Could she have been a loving ...”
• “It was noon, quite light outside; inside it is not. A few cuts of sun break through the roof and walls but once there th...”
• “I know what every colored woman in this country is doing. . . . Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying li...”
• “I'm just trying to look at something without blinking, to see what it is like, or it could have been like, and how that ...”
• “With that, she gathered her blanket around her elbows and ascended the lily-white stairs like a bride. Outside, snow sol...”
• “I remember reading that [The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison] in high school and my mind being blown. I remember that book b...”
• “What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the p...”
• “I don't think I would have ever written Bastard if I hadn't read The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. In fact, I know I woul...”