Toni Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18, 1931) is an American novelist, essayist, editor, teacher, and professor emeritus at Princeton University.
A coward with a gun is the most dangerous person in the world
Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It's not having no responsibilitie s; it's choosing the ones you want.
When I went into the publishing industry, many women talked about the difficulty they had in persuading their families to let them go to college. They educated the boys, and the girls had to struggle.
I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.
Long before I was a success, my parents made me feel like I could be one.
It's a bad word, 'belong. ' Especially when you put it with somebody you love. . . You can't own a human being.
I want to discourage you from choosing anything or making any decision simply because it is safe. Things of value seldom are
You are your own stories and therefore free to imagine and experience what it means to be human. . . . And although you don't have complete control over the narrative (no author does, I can tell you), you could nevertheless create it.
Her mind traveled crooked streets and aimless goat paths, arriving sometimes at profundity, other times at the revelations of a three-year-old. Throughout this fresh, if common, pursuit of knowledge, one conviction crowned her efforts:. . . she knew there was nothing to fear.
Something that is loved is never lost.
Like friendship, hatred needed more than physical intimacy; it wanted creativity and hard work to sustain itself
In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent.
I am in the position of judging people by the best they've ever done rather than the worst.
I have difficulties with contemporary language. Big difficulties. I counted, you know, something like 160 words have disappeared from the English language because of the use of the word "like. " "I'm like, he's like" - not "thought," not "as if. "
If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down.
I couldn't bear to have people mispronounce my name. But the person I was was this person who was called Chloe.
Womanists is what black feminists used to call themselves. Very much so. They were not the same thing. And also the relationship with men. Historically, black women have always sheltered their men because they were out there, and they were the ones that were most likely to be killed.
Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.
When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world?
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.