Toni Morrison Jazz Quotes & Sayings

Even the merest gesture is holy if it is filled with faith. — Franz Kafka

... he didn't needs words or even want them because he knew how they could lie, could heat your blood and disappear. — Toni Morrison

Welcome majestic morning;
full of gratitude,
I want to give you my love & my smile. — Kristian Goldmund Aumann

We women, me and you. Tell me something real. Don't just say I'm grown and ought to know. I don't. I'm fifty and I don't know nothing. What about it? Do I stay with him? I want to, I think. I want ... well, I didn't always ... now I want. I want some fat in this life."
"Wake up. Fat or lean, you got just one. This is it."
"You don't know either, do you?"
"I know enough to know how to behave."
"Is that it? Is that all it is?"
"Is that all what is?"
"Oh shoot! Where the grown people? Is it us?"
"Oh, Mama." Alice Manfred blurted it out and then covered her mouth.
Violet had the same thought: Mama. Mama? Is this where you got to and couldn't do it no more? The place of shade without trees where you know you are not and never again will be loved by anybody who can choose to do it? Where everything is over but the talking?
- Violet Trace and Alice Manfred — Toni Morrison

Nobody gave you to me. Nobody said that's the one for you. I picked you out. Wrong time, yep, and doing wrong by my wife. But the picking out, the choosing. Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it. I saw you and made up my mind. My mind. And I made up my mind to follow you too. Joe Trace — Toni Morrison

People ask, 'Why is it called 5 Seconds of Summer when there's four of you?' — Ashton Irwin

The girl's face looks greedy, haughty and very lazy. The cream-at-the-top-of-the-milkpail face of someone who will never work for anything; someone who picks up things lying on other people's dressers and is not embarrassed when found out. It is the face of a sneak who glides over to your sink to rinse the fork you have laid by her plate. An inward face
whatever it sees is its own self. You are there, it says, because I am looking at you. — Toni Morrison

Are you kidding? I jumped off a building
of course I'm hurt. — Derek Landy

I can be a much better player. I've got a long ways to go. — Lauren Jackson

It is habit for me to discount myself before somebody else does it for me. Better to get in the first lick — Errol Flynn

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

This notion of rest, it's attractive to her, but I don't think she would like it. They are all like that, these women. Waiting for the ease, the space that need not be filled with anything other than the drift of their own thoughts. But they wouldn't like it. They are busy and thinking of ways to be busier because such a space of nothing pressing to do would knock them down. No fields of cowslips will rush into that opening, nor mornings free of flies and heat when the light is shy. No. Not at all. They fill their mind and hands with soap and repair and dicey confrontations because what is waiting for them, in a suddenly idle moment, is the seep of rage. Molten. Thick and slow-moving. Mindful and particular about what in its path it chooses to bury. Or else, into a beat of time, and sideways under their breasts, slips a sorrow they don't know where from. — Toni Morrison

The sooner we get started with alternative energy sources and recognize that fossil fuels makes us less secure as a nation, and more dangerous as a planet, the better off we'll be. — Lindsey Graham

As is the microcosm, so is the macrocosm, As is the atom, so is the universe, As is the human mind, so is the cosmic mind. — Deepak Chopra

He fell for an eighteen-year old girl with one of those deepdown spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going. — Toni Morrison

You can't just sit in a corner weeping or you'll die. — Elizabeth Wein

Black women were armed, black women were dangerous and the less money they had the deadlier the weapon they chose. — Toni Morrison

On the bed, Eugenides stirred restlessly. "Upset at the sight of blood?" he said. "Not my wife, Ornon."
"Your blood," the ambassador pointed out.
Eugenides glanced at the hook on his arm and conceded the point. "Yes," he said. He seemed lost in memory. The room was quiet. — Megan Whalen Turner

Yes, I know I've played these women, but I'm not really conniving at all. — Annette Bening

Cassidy continued to rub his chest and groaned at Ollie pleadingly. "I don"t like it. Make it stop."
"It"s just love, sweetie. It won"t kill you. I promise."
"Love totally sucks ass!"
Ollie shrugged nonchalantly. "Perhaps I"m wrong. Maybe you"re having a heart attack."
Cassidy glanced back up, hopeful. "You think?"
Ollie shook his head. "You"re one sick bitch. — Ethan Day

We'd been going home with television every night for years, but suddenly we had reason to respect it in the morning. — Alan Sepinwall

In my mother's church, everybody read the Bible and it was mostly about music. My mother had the most beautiful voice I have ever heard in my life. She could sing anything - classical, jazz, blues, opera. And people came from long distances to that little church she went to - African Methodist Episcopal, the AME church she belonged to - just hear her. — Toni Morrison

If I had free will, I would choose to be funnier. — Stephen Cave

Success and glory are in the advance, disaster and shame lurk in the rear. — John Pope

Alice thought, No. It wasn't the War and the disgruntled veterans; it wasn't the droves and droves of colored people flocking to paychecks and streets full of themselves. It was the music. The dirty, get-on-down music the women sang and the men played and both danced to, close and shamelesss or apart and wild ... It made you do unwise disorderly things. Just hearing it was like violating the law. — Toni Morrison