Quotes & Sayings About Beloved Toni Morrison

But most of all books (I say again and again) are like the Thirty-Mile Woman from Toni Morrison's Beloved: 'She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.' ~ Junot Diaz, author of the Pulitzer Prize novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. — Leah Price

The desire, let alone the gesture,to meet her needs was good enough to loft her spirits to the place where she could take the next step: ask for some clarifying word; some advice about how to keep on with a brain greedy for news nobody could live with in a world happy to provide it. — Toni Morrison

Rainwater held on to pine needles for dear life and Beloved could not take her eyes off Sethe. — Toni Morrison

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

If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up. — Toni Morrison

I was talking about time. It's so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it's just my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it's not. [...] What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don't think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. [...] Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it's you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It's when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else. — Toni Morrison

Anything is better than the silence when she answered to hands gesturing and was indifferent to the movement of lips. When she saw every little thing and colors leaped smoldering into view. She will forgo the most violent of sunsets, stars as fat as dinner plates and all the blood of autumn and settle for the palest yellow if it comes from her Beloved. — Toni Morrison

Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn't get interested in leaving life or living it, let alone the fright of two creeping-off boys. Her past had been like her present - intolerable - and since she knew death was anything but forgetfulness, she used the little energy left her for pondering color. — Toni Morrison

I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved. — Toni Morrison

The threads of malice creeping toward him from Beloved's side of the table were held harmless in the warmth of Sethe's smile. — Toni Morrison

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

I did not want to write this book as a way of explaining the humanity of Vietnamese. Toni Morrison says in Beloved that to have to explain yourself to white people distorts you because you start from a position of assuming your inhumanity or lack of humanity in other people's eyes. Rather than writing a book that tries to affirm humanity, which is typically the position that minority writers are put into, the book starts from the assumption that we are human, and then goes on to prove that we're also inhuman at the same time. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

You know, the kind who know Jesus by His first name, but out of politeness never use it even to His face. — Toni Morrison

And in all those escapes he could not help being astonished by the beauty of this land that was not his. He his in its breast, fingered its earth for food, clung to its banks to lap water and tried not to love it. On nights when the sky was personal, weak with the weight of its own stars, he made himself not love it. Its graveyards and its low-lying rivers. Or just a house - solitary under a chinaberry tree; maybe a mule tethered and the light hitting its hide just so. Anything could stir him and he tried hard not to love it. — Toni Morrison

My experience is that I find myself having to constantly define myself to others, day-in, day-out. The quote that's helped me the most through that is from Toni Morrison's "Beloved" where she says, "Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined" - so I find myself defining myself for other people lest I be defined by others and stuck into some box where I don't particularly belong — Wentworth Miller

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

Beloved, she my daughter. She mine. See. She come back to me of her own free will and I don't have to explain a thing. — Toni Morrison

Oh, some of us "loved" her. The Maginot Line. And Cholly loved her. I'm sure he did. He, at any rate, was the one who loved her enough to touch her, envelope her, give something of her filled the matrix of her agony with death. Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover's inward eye. — Toni Morrison

Mister was allowed to be and stay what he was. But I wasn't allowed to be and stay what I was [ ... ] School teacher changed me. I was something else and that something else was less than a chicken sitting in the sun on a tub. (Paul D.) — Toni Morrison

There in the dark her memory was refreshed, and she succumbed to her earlier dreams. Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another - physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap. She forgot lust and simple caring for. She regarded love as possessive mating, and romance as the goal of the spirit. It would be for her a well-spring from which she would draw the most destructive emotions, deceiving the lover and seeking to imprison the beloved, curtailing freedom in every way.
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye — Toni Morrison

Responding to Wright's critique, Hurston claimed that she had wanted at long last to write a black novel, and "not a treatise on sociology." It is this urge that resonates in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Beloved, and in Walker's depiction of Hurston as our prime symbol of "racial health - a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings, a sense that is lacking in so much black writing and literature." In a tradition in which male authors have ardently denied black literary paternity, this is a major development, one that heralds the refinement of our notion of tradition: Zora and her daughters are a tradition-within-the-tradition, a black woman's voice. — Zora Neale Hurston

Good for you. More it hurt more better it is. Can't nothing heal without pain, you know. — Toni Morrison

Nobody loved her and she wouldn't have liked it if they had, she considered love a serious disability. — Toni Morrison

No gasp at a miracle that is truly miraculous because the magic lies in the fact that you knew it was there for you all along. — Toni Morrison

There was no bad luck in the world but whitepeople. 'They don't know when to stop,' she said, and returned to her bed, pulled up the quilt and left them to hold that thought forever. — Toni Morrison

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

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 for her she fills the basket she opens the grass I would help her but the clouds are in the way how can I say things that are pictures I am not separate from her there is no place where I stop her face is my own and I want to be there in the place where her face is and to be looking at it too a hot thing. — Toni Morrison

One of the monstrous things that slavery in this country caused was the breakup of families. Physical labor, horrible; beatings, horrible; lynching death, all of that, horrible. But the living life of a parent who has no control over what happens to your children, none. They don't belong to you. You may not even nurse them. They may be shipped off somewhere, as in "Beloved" the mother was, to be nursed by somebody who was not able to work in the fields and was a wet nurse. — Toni Morrison

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

If I did I didn't know it. What's it like, velvet?'

'Well, Lu, velvet is like the world was just born. Clean and new and so smooth. — Toni Morrison

Not knowing it was hard; knowing it was harder — Toni Morrison