Toni Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18, 1931) is an American novelist, essayist, editor, teacher, and professor emeritus at Princeton University.
The language must be careful and must appear effortless. It must not sweat. It must suggest and be provocative at the same time.
Misery colored by the greens and blues in my mother's voice took away all the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet.
I wish I’d a knowed more people. I would of loved ‘em all. If I’d a knowed more, I would a loved more
Perhaps that's what all human relationships boiled down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?
For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction.
you got two feet, Sethe, not four. " he said, and right then a forest sprang up between them; tactless and quiet.
I have the wonderful pleasure of finishing the book and closing it. And I don't read them later.
All the books that were being published by African-American guys were saying 'screw whitey', or some variation of that. Not the scholars but the pop books. And the other thing they said was, 'You have to confront the oppressor. ' I understand that. But you don't have to look at the world through his eyes. I'm not a stereotype; I'm not somebody else's version of who I am. And so when people said at that time black is beautiful – yeah? Of course. Who said it wasn't? So I was trying to say, in The Bluest Eye, wait a minute. Guys. There was a time when black wasn't beautiful. And you hurt.
You been gone too long, Sula. Not too long, but maybe too far.
Laughter is more serious than tears.
All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.
In a way, her strangeness, her naiveté, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of an idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings, had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like an artist with no art form, she became dangerous.
they ran in the sunlight, creating their own breeze which pressed their dresses into their damp skin. Reaching a kind of square of four locked trees which promised cooling; they flung themselves into the shade to taste their lip sweat and contemplate the wildness that had come upon them so suddenly
But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.
Political doesn't necessarily mean you have an agenda.
There's a difference between writing for a living and writing for life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises. . . . If you write for life, you'll work hard; you'll do what's honest, not what pays
Only her tight, tight eyes were left. They were always left. . . They were everything. Everything was there, in them. . . Thrown, in this way, into the binding conviction that only a miracle could relieve her, she would never know her beauty. She would see only what there was to see: the eyes of other people.
I don't believe any real artists have ever been non-political. They may have been insensitive to this particular plight or insensitive to that, but they were political, because that's what an artist is-a politician.
You rely on a sentence to say more than the denotation and the connotation; you revel in the smoke that the words send up.
Liberation means you don't have to be silenced.