Morrison Quotes & Sayings

Outdoors, we knew, was the real terror of life. The threat of being outdoors surfaced frequently in those days. Every possibility of excess was curtailed with it. If somebody ate too much, he could end up outdoors. If somebody used too much coal, he could end up outdoors. People could gamble themselves outdoors, drink themselves outdoors. Sometimes mothers put their sons outdoors, and when that happened, regardless of what the son had done, all sympathy was with him. He was outdoors, and his own flesh had done it. To be put outdoors by a landlord was one thing - unfortunate, but an aspect of life over which you had no control, since you could not control your income. But to be slack enough to put oneself outdoors, or heartless enough to put one's own kin outdoors - that was criminal. — Toni Morrison

Metaphor is one of a group of problem-solving medicines known as figures of speech which are normally used to treat literal thinking and other diseases. — Grant Morrison

I laughed but before I could agree with the hairdressers that she was crazy, she said, 'What's the world for if you can't make it up the way you want it?'
" 'The way I want it?'
" 'Yeah. The way you want it. Don't you want it to be something more than what it is?'
" 'What'st eh point? I can't change it.'
" 'That's the point. If you don't, it will change you and it'll be your fault cause you let it. I let it. And messed up my life.'
" 'Mess it up how?'
" 'Forgot it.'
" 'Forgot?'
" 'Forgot it was mine. My life. I just ran up and down the streets wishing I was somebody else. — Toni Morrison

How can he not love your hair? It's the same hair that grows out of his own armpits. The same hair that crawls up out his crotch on up his stomach. All over his chest. The very same. It grows out of his nose, over his lips, and if he ever lost his razor it would grow all over his face. It's all over his head, Hagar. It's his hair too. He got to love it. — Toni Morrison

Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you'd have a little love left over for the next one. — Toni Morrison

That I should just dive in and let my world fall apart and rebuild itself. That if I can embrace change, I can embrace death, and that is the secret to liberation. — Suzanne Morrison

Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth. — Toni Morrison

Van Morrison remains a singer who can be compared to no other in the history of modern popular music. — Greil Marcus

The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one. — Toni Morrison

Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. — Toni Morrison

The probability of success is difficult to estimate; but if we never search the chance of success is zero. — Philip Morrison

Knowledge comes by taking things apart, analysis. But wisdom comes by putting things together. — John Alexander Morrison

Wasn't there a tribe in Africa that lashed the dead body to the back of the one who had murdered it? That would certainly be justice - to carry the rotting corpse around as a physical burden as well as public shame and damnation. — Toni Morrison

I don't think one parent can raise a child. I don't think two parents can raise a child. You really need the whole village. — Toni Morrison

Poison is like the drowned; it always floats. — Toni Morrison

Surely God loves to get out of church buildings and go visit people where they hunger for reality. — Dylan Morrison

Love is divine only and difficult always. — Toni Morrison

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

[He] ... watches the Joker rising from his wheelchair, the way a rabbit watches car headlights bearing down, unable to move a single, spotlit muscle. The madman's limbs appear to unlatch as though some psychotic god has chosen to give life to a complicated Swiss Army knife. The Joker's head rotates ... the green lasers of his eyes target the keys at the big man's belt, and he shakes his head. — Grant Morrison

Anger ... it's a paralyzing emotion ... you can't get anything done. People sort of think it's an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling - I don't think it's any of that - it's helpless ... it's absence of control - and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers ... and anger doesn't provide any of that - I have no use for it whatsoever.
[Interview with CBS radio host Don Swaim, September 15, 1987.] — Toni Morrison

Sethe, he says, "me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow."
He leans over and takes her hand. With the other he touches her face. "You your best thing, Sethe, You are." His holding fingers are holding hers.
"Me? Me? — Toni Morrison

You have pissed your last in this house ... and I don't make velvet roses anymore. — Toni Morrison

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

Just recently I worked with Van Morrison and I came to realize that money can't make a decent human being out of you. — Jim Sullivan

124 WAS SPITEFUL. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For — 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

Nobody understands you better than yourself, but if someone tries to do it is because he loves you. — Jim Morrison

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

Lying on stained, wretched sheets with a bleeding virgin
We could plan a murder
Or start a religion. — Jim Morrison

There are some writers who sweep us along so strongly in their current of energy--Normal mailer, Tom Wolfe, Toni Morrison, William F. Buckley, Jr., Hunter Thompson, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers--that we assume that when they go to work the words just flow. Nobody thinks of the effort they made every morning to turn on the switch. You also have to turn on the switch. Nobody is going to do it for you. — William Zinsser

I dream a dream that dreams back at me — Toni Morrison

I run blindly through the madhouse ... And I cannot even pray ... For I have no God. — Grant Morrison

It isn't true what they say about mothers. We don't hate our sons'
girlfriends. The sleazy ones - maybe. But we're mostly delighted and a little startled when a wonderful girl loves our son. And relieved the son is smart enough to love her back. I'm grateful,
Beth. — Angela Morrison

If I hadn't trained Lula Ann properly she wouldn't have known to always cross the street and avoid white boys. — Toni Morrison

I can never not have you have me. — Toni Morrison

I am nothing to you. You say I am wilderness. I am. Is that a tremble on your mouth, in your eye? Are you afraid? You should be. — Toni Morrison

A man ain't a goddamn axe, choppin', hackin', bustin' every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can't chop down, because they inside. — Toni Morrison

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

Each generation wants new symbols, new people, new names. They want to divorce themselves from their predecessors. — Jim Morrison

I'm a fan myself, so I try to write the kind of comics I want to read. — Grant Morrison

Sula was wrong. Hell ain't things lasting forever. Hell is change. Not only did men leave and children grow up and die, but even the misery didn't last. One day she wouldn't even have that. This very grief that had twisted her into a curve on the floor and flayed her would be gone. She would lose that too.
Why, even in hate here I am thinking of what Sula said. — Toni Morrison

Did you ever see the way the clouds love a mountain? They circle all around it; sometimes you can't even see the mountain for the clouds. But you know what? ... The clouds never cover the head. His head pokes through, because the clouds let him; they don't wrap him up. They let him keep his head high, free. — Toni Morrison

Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous. — Toni Morrison

It's always the same with lost people; you start out looking for them, and you end up losing yourself. — Grant Morrison

Look at us! Are we not proof that there is no good, no evil, no truth, no reason? Are we not proof that the universe is a drooling idiot with no fashion sense - Mr Nobody on the fundamental philosophy of the Brotherhood of DADA — Grant Morrison

The day Stamp Paid saw the two backs through the window and then hurried down the steps, he believed the undecipherable language clamoring around the house was the mumbling of the black and angry dead. Very few had died in bed, like Baby Suggs, and none that he knew of, including Baby, had lived a livable life. Even the educated colored: the long-school people, the doctors, the teachers, the paper-writers and businessmen had a hard row to hoe. In addition to having to use their heads to get ahead, they had the weight of the whole race sitting there. You needed two heads for that. Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. — Toni Morrison

Black people's music is in a class by itself and always has been. There's nothing like it. The reason for that is because it was not tampered with by white people. It was not on the media. It was not anywhere except where black people were. And it is one of the art forms in which black people decided what is good in it. Nobody told them. What surfaced and what floated to the top, were the giants and the best. — Toni Morrison

When they fall in love with a city, it is for forever and it is like forever. — Toni Morrison

They were believed and trusted, but most of all they were listened to. — Toni Morrison

But the important thing is that I don't do anything else. I avoid social life normally associated with publishing. I don't go to the cocktail parties, I don't give or go to dinner parties. I need that time in the evening because I can do a tremendous amount of work then. And I can concentrate. When I sit down to write I never brood. I have so many other things to do, with my children and teaching, that I can't afford it ... — Toni Morrison

At the end of the day, we should give thanks and pray, to the one, to the one. — Van Morrison

Of course I'm a threat. Why? Did you think for a moment that I wasn't? - Emma Frost — Grant Morrison

Have I told you lately that I love you, have I told you lately there's no one above you. Fill my heart with gladness, take away all my sadness, ease my troubles, that's what you do. — Van Morrison

American writers often say they find it difficult to write Superman. They say he's too powerful; you can't give him problems. But Superman is a metaphor. For me, Superman has the same problems we do, but on a Paul Bunyan scale. If Superman walks the dog, he walks it around the asteroid belt because it can fly in space. When Superman's relatives visit, they come from the 31st century and bring some hellish monster conqueror from the future. But it's still a story about your relatives visiting. — Grant Morrison

I quite like American music, like The Fray - I'm a massive fan of them - and The Killers. I also like more acoustic stuff like Ed Sheeran; I like this English songwriter James Morrison and another singer called Ben Howard. — Louis Tomlinson

I needed a whole heart once in my life. Is that so wrong? — Angela Morrison

One shouldn't take life so seriously. No one gets out alive anyway. — Jim Morrison

There is honey in this land sweeter than any I know of, and I have cut cane in places where the dirt itself tasted like sugar, so that's saying a heap. — Toni Morrison

No one here gets out alive. — Jim Morrison

I have this self-conscious inclination to just say "anyone who hates it, that's cool that's fine!" — Philip Morrison

What, you didn't pack your lunch?" Ty asked sarcastically as he
shifted around in the seat and wedged himself against the door. He kicked a
foot up and propped it on the console between the two front seats.
"Sure, in my SpongeBob SquarePants lunch box. I have the thermos,
too," Morrison shot right back.
Zane kept his mouth shut, eyes moving between the two men, and
occasionally back to the driver, who was casually paying attention.
Ty stared at the kid and narrowed his eyes further. "Spongewhat?" he
asked flatly.
Zane didn't even try to hold back the chuckle when Morrison looked
at Ty like he'd lost his mind.
"Spongewha ... you're yanking my chain, aren't you?" Morrison
said. "Henny, he's yanking my chain."
"Yeah, well, that's what you getting for waving it in his face," the
driver answered reasonably.
"What the hell is a SpongeBob?" Ty asked Zane quietly in the
backseat. — Madeleine Urban

Tough shit, buddy. Your tough shit... — Toni Morrison

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

The world we suggest is a new wild west. A sensuous evil world. Strange and haunting, the path of the sun ... — Jim Morrison

Somebody has to take responsibility for being a leader. — Toni Morrison

My piece in One World or None was the description of the effect of a single atomic bomb on New York City. — Philip Morrison

Some words we use all the time are difficult to define when we actually have to think about them. We use the word "evil" all the time but when asked to define what we are talking about, it can be quite difficult.

Think about evil as you would think of counterfeit currency. A counterfeit is the corruption of something real. You can have real currency without the existence of any counterfeits. You cannot, however, have counterfeits without the real thing existing first. Evil is dependent on the existence of goodness but goodness is not dependent on evil. Goodness was there first. It is an absolute. Evil must always be thought of in relationship with absolute goodness. — Jon Morrison

The God in me winks at the God in you. And — Peggy Senger Morrison

The message of the Nazarene had been turned into a weapon in some religious power game. 'Look how they love one another' just didn't seem an apt description of the bizarre religious theatre I'd just witnessed. — Dylan Morrison

Like many of us left here I thought I knew you. Now I discover that in your company it is myself I know. That is the astonishing gift of your art and your friendship: You gave us ourselves to think about, to cherish. — Toni Morrison

The claim that science can disprove God's existence is an honest ambition but it is a statement that is actually impossible to back up. This is because the task of proving something like science is unprovable by scientific methods. How do you prove an idea like "science"? What container do you use to measure it? What laws of science do you use to prove science? That's the first reason why the worldview of scientism, the belief that science proves everything, fails to work out in real life. Science cannot prove everything because it cannot even prove itself. — Jon Morrison

I was onstage with Menudo since I was 12 years old. To us, the most successful one was the guy with the most fans. If you moved your hips and the girls screamed, you were getting it right. Who wouldn't want to be like Elvis or Jim Morrison! — Ricky Martin

There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race
scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct ... it has a social function, racism. — Toni Morrison

The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn't shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing. — Toni Morrison

Their drift away from others produced a selfish privacy and they had lost the refuge and the consolation of a clan. Baptists, Presbyterians, tribe, army, family, some encircling outside thing was needed. Pride, she thought. Pride alone made them think that they needed only themselves, could shape life that way, like Adam and Eve, like gods from nowhere beholden to nothing except their own creations. She should have warned them, but her devotion cautioned against impertinence. As long as Sir was alive it was easy to veil the truth: that they were not a family-not even a like-minded group. They were orphans, each and all. — Toni Morrison

The best thing she was, was her children. — Toni Morrison

One of my kids was born in 1968. There were going to be political difficulties, but they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to. — Toni Morrison

I like marriage. The idea. — Toni Morrison

Life hurts a lot more than death. - Jim Morrison — Robert Kirkman

I don't think anyone wants to be in a role forever. — Matthew Morrison

Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free. — Jim Morrison

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

Burnout is grist to the mill. I write every day, for most of the day, so it's just about turning into metaphor whatever's going on in my life, in the world, and in my head. Every nightmare, every moment of grief or joy or failure, is a moment I can convert into cash via words. — Grant Morrison

That's what real love amounts to - letting a person be what he really is. Most people love you for who you pretend to be. To keep their love, you keep pretending - performing. You get to love your pretence. It's true, we're locked in an image, an act - and the sad thing is, people get so used to their image, they grow attached to their masks. They love their chains. They forget all about who they really are. And if you try to remind them, they hate you for it, they feel like you're trying to steal their most precious possession. — Jim Morrison

There's a lot of griping and groaning about wanting to play half-baked new songs live, but you don't want it to just end up on YouTube with like 74 thumbs down: "This is the worst!" — Travis Morrison

Her heavy knives of defense against misery, regret, gall and hurt, she placed one by one on a bank where dear water rushed on below. — Toni Morrison

where she might find David Morrison, who she wanted to interview — Nancy C. Davis

The idea of a wanton woman is something I have inserted into almost all of my books. An outlaw figure who is disallowed in the community because of her imagination or activity or status - that kind of anarchic figure has always fascinated me. — Toni Morrison

You have to be willing to think the unthinkable. — Toni Morrison

She banged her knuckles until they ached to get the attention of the living flesh behind the glass, and would have smashed her fist through the window just to touch him, feel his heat, the only thing that could protect her from a smothering death of dry roses. — Toni Morrison

He relished never knowing what lay in his path, who might approach with what intention. — Toni Morrison

Everything depends on knowing how much," she said, and "Good is knowing when to stop. — Toni Morrison

As a journalist I'm asked whether I make things up. As a novelist I'm accused of telling the truth. — Lennox Morrison

I think long and carefully about what novels ought to do. They should clarify the roles that have become obscured; they ought to identify those things in the past that are useful and those things that are not; and they ought to give nourishment. — Toni Morrison

If you can't count, they can cheat you. If you can't read, they can beat you. — Toni Morrison

Memories, how they linger in the twilight and in the wee small hours sometimes just before dawn. — Van Morrison

We don't want him, we want you.-- Cooper Hawkes.

This isn't a dating service. We're in the middle of a war. If we stop following orders, there will be no order. It'll all fall apart.- T.C. McQueen — James Morrison

I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me. — Toni Morrison

They laughed too, even Rose Dear shook her head and smiled, and suddenly the world was right side up. Violet learned then what she had forgotten until this moment: that laughter is serious. More complicated, more serious than tears. — Toni Morrison

At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough. — Toni Morrison