Famous Quotes & Sayings

Toni Morrison Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Toni Morrison.

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Famous Quotes By Toni Morrison

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I wanted to redirect, reinvent the political, cultural, and artistic judgments saved for African American writers. — Toni Morrison

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The narrower their lives, the wider their hips. — Toni Morrison

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How can I take crime shows seriously where the female detectives track killers in Louboutin heels? — Toni Morrison

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They shoot the white girl first. — Toni Morrison

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What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them. — Toni Morrison

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The calculated violence of a shark grew in her, and like every witch that ever rode a broom straight through the night to a ceremonial infanticide as thrilled by the black wind as by the rod between her legs; like every fed-up-to-the-teeth bride who worried about the consistency of the grits she threw at her husband as well as the potency of the lye she had stirred into them; and like every queen and every courtesan who was struck by the beauty of her emerald ring as she tipped its poison into the old red wine, Hagar was energized by the details of her mission. — Toni Morrison

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There is no civilization that did not begin with art, Whether it was drawing a line in the sand, painting a cave or dancing. — Toni Morrison

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I am charmed by the idea that there is an activity known as work and another as play, although even in grade school the distinction eluded me. I remember how full of hope I was sitting in first-period home room listening to the teacher divide up our activities into purposeful sections. I got a grip on her process, at last, by picturing it in the following way: A cow stands in clover. When she is milked, that is her work; when she is merely eating, that is her play. But the problem lay, then as now, in the realization that, in any case, she is standing in clover. Not a handsome or elegant analogy, but it approximates for me the habit of reading - standing in a world of clover, the eating of which is occasionally utilitarian, usually nourishing, because that's what one does — Toni Morrison

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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. — Toni Morrison

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Sweet, she thought. He must think I can't bear to hear him say it. That after all I have told him and after telling me how many feet I have, "goodbye" would break me to pieces. Ain't that sweet.
"So long," she murmured from the far side of the trees. — Toni Morrison

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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. — Toni Morrison

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I sang "O Holy Night" in a school choir. My mother came and listened to me and complimented me. So that was the high point. I cannot sing a note. — Toni Morrison

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I think being an editor really helped me take other people's notes on my writing. I'd get a note like 'It's too wet' or 'The first couple chapters are good, but then the rest of the pages were so wet that they were completely illegible' or 'Did you dip this in Sprite? This smells like Sprite. Why would you dip your novel in Sprite?' And instead of pushing back, I'd listen. That's an incredibly important skill for a young writer to have. — Toni Morrison

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Because slave life had "busted her legs, back, head, eyes, hands, kidneys, womb and tongue," she had nothing left to make a living with but her heart
which she put to work at once. Accepting no title of honor before her name, but allowing a small caress after it, she became an unchurched preacher, one who visited pulpits and opened her great heart to those who could use it. — Toni Morrison

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And I am all the things I have ever loved: scuppernong wine, cool baptisms in silent water, dream books and number playing. — Toni Morrison

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Michael was a purveyor of exotics, a typical anthropologist, a cultural orphan who sought other cultures he could love without risk or pain. — Toni Morrison

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It was a silly age, twenty-five; too old for teenaged dreaming, too young for settling down. Every corner was a possibility and a dead end. — Toni Morrison

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In fact her maturity and blood kinship converted her passion to fever, so it was more affliction than affection. It literally knocked her down at night, and raised her up in the morning, for when she dragged herself off to bed, having spent another day without his presence, her heart beat like a gloved fist against her ribs. And in the morning, long before she was fully awake, she felt a longing so bitter and tight it yanked her out of a sleep swept clean of dreams. — Toni Morrison

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She shook her head from side to side, resigned to her rebellious brain. Why was there nothing it refused? No misery, no regret, no hateful picture too rotten to accept? Like a greedy child it snatched up everything. Just once, could it say, No thank you? I just ate and can't hold another bite? I am full — Toni Morrison

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Beginning Beloved with numerals rather than spelled out numbers, it was my intention to give the house an identity separate from the street or even the city. — Toni Morrison

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Women did what strawberry plants did before they shot out their thin vines: the quality of the green changed. Then the vine threads came, then the buds. By the time the white petals died and the mint-colored berry poked out, the leaf shine was gilded tight and waxy. — Toni Morrison

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Mrs. Breedlove considered herself an upright and Christian woman, burdened with a no-count man, whom God wanted her to punish. (Cholly was beyond redemption, of course, and redemption was hardly the point - Mrs. Breedlove was not interested in Christ the Redeemer, but rather Christ the Judge.) Often she could be heard discoursing with Jesus about Cholly, pleading with Him to help her "strike the bastard down from his pea-knuckle of pride." And once when a drunken gesture catapulted Cholly into the red-hot stove, she screamed, "Get him, Jesus! Get him!" If Cholly had stopped drinking, she would have never forgiven Jesus. — Toni Morrison

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It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love ... You can't own a human being. — Toni Morrison

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It was becoming a habit-this concentration on things behind him. Almost as though there were no future to be had. *Milkman* — Toni Morrison

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We will be judged by how well we love. — Toni Morrison

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And even later, when for the first time in her life she had lain in bed with a man and said his name involuntarily or said it truly meaning him, the name she was screaming and saying was not his at all. — Toni Morrison

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It's been mentioned or suggested that Paradise will not be well studied, because it's about this unimportant intellectual topic, which is religion. — Toni Morrison

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When I write, I don't translate for white readers ... Dostoevski wrote for a Russian audience, but we're able to read him. If I'm specific, and I don't overexplain, then anyone can overhear me. — Toni Morrison

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At first the people in the town were frightened; they knew Shadrack was crazy but that did not mean that he didn't have any sense or, even more important, that he had no power. [ ... ] Once the people understood the boundaries and nature of his madness, they could fit him, so to speak, into the scheme of things. — Toni Morrison

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Ruth looked for the water mark several times during the day. She knew it was there, would always be there, but she needed to confirm its presence. Like the keeper of the lighthouse and the prisoner, she regarded it as a mooring, a checkpoint, some stable visual object that assured her that the world was still there; that this was life and not a dream. That she was alive somewhere, inside, which she acknowledged to be true only because a thing she knew intimately was out there, outside herself. — Toni Morrison

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From the windows, through the fur of snow, the landscape became more melancholy when the sun successfully brightened the quiet trees, unable to speak without their leaves. — Toni Morrison

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I don't want to be a free nigger; I want to be a free man."
"Don't we all. Look. Be what you want
white or black. Choose. But if you choose black, you got to act black, meaning draw your manhood up - quicklike, and don't bring me no whiteboy sass."
Hunter's Hunter and Godlen Gray — Toni Morrison

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Race is the least reliable information you can have about someone. It's real information, but it tells you next to nothing. — Toni Morrison

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Every now and then she looked around for tangible evidence of his having ever been there. Where were the butterflies? the blueberries? the whistling reed? She could find nothing, for he had left nothing but his stunning absence. — Toni Morrison

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In time the whole family perked up like Sesame Street puppets, hoping that cheer, if worked at hard enough, could sugar the living and quiet the dead. — Toni Morrison

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Fact was she knew more about them than she knew about herself, having never had the map to discover what she was like.
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 mother? A faithful wife? Have I got a sister and does she favor me? If my mother knew me would she like me? (140) — Toni Morrison

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It's not about choosing somebody over her. It's about making space for somebody along with her. — Toni Morrison

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Listen, baby, people do funny things. Specially us. The cards are stacked against us and just trying to stay in the game, stay alive and in the game, makes us do funny things. Things we can't help. Things that make us hurt one another. We don't even know why. — Toni Morrison

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There was a hint of spring in her sole green eyes, something summery in her complexion, and a rich autumn ripeness in her walk. — Toni Morrison

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From my point of view, which is that of a storyteller, I see your life as something artful, waiting, just waiting and ready for you to make it art. — Toni Morrison

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I lived in a little working-class town that had no black neighborhoods at all - one high school. We all played together. Everybody was either somebody from the South or an immigrant from East Europe or from Mexico. And there was one church, and there were four elementary schools. And we were all, pretty much until the end of the war, very, very poor. — Toni Morrison

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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. — Toni Morrison

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Isolation, you know, carries the seeds of its own destruction because as times change, other things seep in. — Toni Morrison

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I sold my elegant blackness to all those childhood ghosts and now they pay me for it. — Toni Morrison

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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. It is in your hands. — Toni Morrison

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Margaret was not dreaming nor was she quite asleep, although the moon looking at her face believed she was. She was experiencing the thing insomniacs dread-- not being awake but the ticky-tacky thoughts that fill in the space where sleep ought to be. Rags and swatches; draincloths and crumpled paper napkins. Old griefs and embarrassments; jealousies and offense. Just common ignoble scraps not deep enough for dreaming and not light enough to dismiss. — Toni Morrison

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Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face; you are me. — Toni Morrison

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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. — Toni Morrison

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No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you. — Toni Morrison

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They come from Mobile. Aiken. From Newport News. From Marietta. From Meridian. And the sounds of these places in their mouths make you think of love. When you ask them where they are from, they tilt their heads and say "Mobile" and you think you've been kissed. They say "Aiken" and you see a white butterfly glance off a fence with a torn wing. They say "Nagadoches" and you want to say "Yes, I will." You don't know what these towns are like, but you love what happens to the air when they open their lips and let the names ease out. — Toni Morrison

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For a long time now he knew that anything could appear to b something else, and probably was. — Toni Morrison

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It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves. — Toni Morrison

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I always looked upon the acts of racist exclusion, or insult, as pitiable, from the other person. I never absorbed that. I always thought that there was something deficient about such people. — Toni Morrison

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When you stiffen, you know that whatever you stiffen about is very important. The stuff is important, the fear itself is information. — Toni Morrison

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This here Sethe talked about love like any other woman; talked about baby clothes like any other woman, but what she meant could cleave the bone. This here Sethe talked about safety with a handsaw. This here new Sethe didn't know where the world stopped and she began. Suddenly he saw what Stamp Paid wanted him to see: more important than what Sethe had done was what she claimed. It scared him. — Toni Morrison

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Nevertheless, remembering how the curate described what existed before creation, Scully saw dark matter out there, thick, unknowable, aching to made into a world. — Toni Morrison

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

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It would be ten years before they saw each other again, and their meeting would be thick with birds. — Toni Morrison

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Nothing could be counted on in a world where even when you were a solution you were a problem. — Toni Morrison

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Lonely, ain't it?
Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else's. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain't that something? A secondhand lonely. — Toni Morrison

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I remember a very important lesson that my father gave me when I was twelve or thirteen. He said, "You know, today I welded a perfect seam and I signed my name to it." And I said, "But, Daddy, no one's going to see it!" And he said, "Yeah, but I know it's there." So when I was working in kitchens, I did good work. — Toni Morrison

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Sometimes the names were humiliating, deliberately so. Somebody would pick out your flaw. If you were little, they would call you Shorty. And if you were angry, they would call you the Devil. — Toni Morrison

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Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something? — Toni Morrison

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You don't have to love me but you damn well have to respect me. — Toni Morrison

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Movements toward freedom and the self-respect that comes from something other than what people think is their most important feature. — Toni Morrison

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The concept of physical beauty as a virtue is one of the dumbest, most pernicious and destructive ideas of the Western world, and we should have nothing to do with it. — Toni Morrison

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We don't need any more writers as solitary heroes. We need a heroic writer's movement: assertive, militant, pugnacious. — Toni Morrison

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The enemy is not men. The enemy is the concept of patriarchy, the concept of patriarchy as the way to run the world or do things. — Toni Morrison

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Dominion won by fear and secured by fear was still sweeter than any that could be got another way. — Toni Morrison

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Her passions were narrow but deep. — Toni Morrison

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Where do you get the right to decide our lives? I'll tell you where. From that little hog's gut that hangs between your legs. Well, let me tell you something ... you will need more than that. I don't know where you will get it or who will give it to you, but mark my words, you will need more than that ... You are a sad, pitiful, stupid, selfish, hateful man. I hope your little hog's gut stands you in good stead, and you take good care of it, because you don't have anything else. — Toni Morrison

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All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.
[Conversation with Elizabeth Farnsworth, PBS NewsHour, March 9, 1998] — Toni Morrison

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You already alone. If you want more alone, I can knock you into the middle of next week, and leave you there. — Toni Morrison

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The screaming audience is no matter for the wild, sexy music. Crowds dance is the aisles; people stand on their bench seats and clap to the drums. My arms are in the air waving to the music. My hips and head sway on their own. Before I see his face, his arms are around my waist, my back to his chest, his chin in my hair. Then his hands are on my stomach and I am dropping mine to hold on to his while we dance back to front. When the music stops I turn around to look at him. He smiles. I am moist and shivering. — Toni Morrison

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A dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However moribund, it is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences. — Toni Morrison

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My father saw two black men lynched on his street in Cartersville, as a child. And I think seeing two black businessmen - not vagrants - hanging from trees as a child was traumatic for him. — Toni Morrison

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What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not? — Toni Morrison

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Her heart kicked and an itchy burning in her throat made her swallow all her saliva away. She didn't know which way to go. — Toni Morrison

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Six months into the bliss of edible sex, free-style music, challenging books and the company of an easy undemanding Bride, the fairy-tale castle collapsed into the mud and sand on which its vanity was built. And Booker ran away. — Toni Morrison

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But I been headin' in this direction for seven years. Walking all around this place. Upstate, downstate, east, west. I been to territory ain't got no name. Never stayin' nowhere long. But when I got here, and sat out there on the porch waitin' for you, I knew it wasn't the place I was headin' toward, it was you. — Toni Morrison

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

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His bed was where they slept and where the great thing people warned about or giggled about took place. It was not so much painful as dull. Cee thought it would get better later. Better turned out to be simply more, and while the quantity increased, its pleasure lay in its brevity. — Toni Morrison

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Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers - not the defined. — Toni Morrison

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Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be. — Toni Morrison

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Like Guitar in Son of Solomon, and Son in Tar Baby, he believed that harmony could never exist between the races. — Toni Morrison

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How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it. — Toni Morrison

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If I'm here ... you can go anywhere you want. Jump if you want to. 'Cause I'll catch you, girl. I'll catch you 'fore you fall. — Toni Morrison

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She needed what most colored girls needed: a chorus of mamas, grandmamas, aunts, cousins, sisters, neighbors, Sunday school teachers, best girl friends, and what all to give her the strength life demanded of her - and the humor with which to live it. — Toni Morrison

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Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now. — Toni Morrison

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Here was an ugly little girl asking for beauty ... A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes. His outrage grew and felt like power. For the first time he honestly wished he could work miracles. — Toni Morrison

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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? — Toni Morrison

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It was my father who could do no wrong. So I didn't think of it as, oh, look, my father's a violent man. — Toni Morrison

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I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it. — Toni Morrison

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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. — Toni Morrison

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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 thing. — Toni Morrison

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And the lives of these old black women were synthesized in their eyes- a puree of tragedy and humor, wickedness and serenity, truth and fantasy. — Toni Morrison

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All of us
all who knew her
felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on
her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity
decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her
awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us
believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams
we used
to silence our own nightmares. — Toni Morrison

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The difference between that which is humane and that which is patriotic is a vital difference. — Toni Morrison

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O Jesus, I could be a mule or plow the furrows with my hands if need be or hold those rickety walls up with my back if need be if I knew that somewhere in this world in the pocket of some night I could open my legs to some cowboy lean hips but you are trying to tell me no and O my sweet Jesus what kind of cross is that? — Toni Morrison

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Well, if a man don't HAVE a chance, then he has to TAKE a chance! — Toni Morrison