Toni Morrison Love Quotes & Sayings

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

She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise. In her country children have bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead to iterate the voice of speechlessness, of disabled and disabling language, of language adults have abandoned altogether as a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance, or expressing love. — Toni Morrison

Love is divine only and difficult always. — Toni Morrison

She knew Paul D was adding something to her life - something she wanted to count on but was scared to ... His waiting eyes and awful human power. The mind of him that knew her own. Her story was bearable because it was his as well - to tell, to refine and tell again. The things neither knew about the other - the things neither had word-shapes for - well, it would come in time. — Toni Morrison

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

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

He talking Louisiana, you speaking Tennessee. The music so different, the sound coming from a different part of the body. It must of been like hearing lyrics set to scores by two different composers. But when you made love he must of have said I love you and you understood that and it was true, too, because I have seen the desperation in his eyes ever since - no matter what business venture he thinks up. — Toni Morrison

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

Maybe that was love. Choking sounds and silence. — 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

She talked like that. But I understood what she meant. About having another you inside that isn't anything like you. Dorcas and I used to make up love scenes and describe them to each other. It was fun and a little smutty. Something about it bothered me, though. Not the loving stuff, but the picture I had of myself when I did it. Nothing like me. I say myself as somebody I'd seen in a picture show or a magazine. Then it would work. If I pictured myself the way I am it seemed wrong. — Toni Morrison

Here I am not the one to throw out. No one steals my warmth and shoes because I am small. No one handles my backside. No one whinnies like sheep or goat because I drop in fear and weakness. No one screams at the sight of me. No one watches my body for how it is unseemly. With you my body is pleasure is safe is belonging. I can never not have you have me. — Toni Morrison

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

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

If they put an iron circle around your neck I will bite it away — Toni Morrison

I've traveled. All over. I've never seen anything like you. How could anything be put together like you? Do you know how beautiful you are? Have you looked at yourself?'
'I'm looking now. — Toni Morrison

Jump, if you want to, 'cause I'll catch you, girl. I'll catch you "fore you fall. Go as far inside as you need to, I'll hold your ankles. Make sure you get back out. I'm not saying this because I need a place to stay. That's the last thing I need. I told you, I'm a walking man, but I been heading in this direction for seven years. Walking all around this place. Upstate, downstate, east, west; I been in territory ain't got no name, never staying nowhere long. But when I got here and sat out there on the porch, waiting for you, well, I knew it wasn't the place I was heading toward; it was you. We can make a life, girl. A life. — Toni Morrison

You're in trouble,' she says, yawning. 'Deep, deep trouble. Can't rival the dead for love. Lose every time. — Toni Morrison

If he looked into her face, he would see those haunted, loving eyes. The hauntedness would irritate him
the love would move him to fury. How dare she love him? Hadn't she any sense at all? What was he supposed to do about that? Return it? How? What could his calloused hands produce to make her smile? What of his knowledge of the world and of life could be useful to her? What could his heavy arms and befuddled brain accomplish that would earn him his own respect, that would in turn allow him to accept her love? — Toni Morrison

What kind of love is it that requires an angel and only an angel for its commitment? — Toni Morrison

Knowing that there was such a thing as outdoors bred in us a hunger for property, for ownership. The firm possession of a yard, a porch, a grape arbor. Propertied black people spent all their energies, all their love, on their nests. Like frenzied, desperate birds, they overdecorated everything; fussed and fidgeted over their hard-won homes; canned, jellied, and preserved all summer to fill the cupboards and shelves; they painted, picked, and poked at every corner of their houses. And these houses loomed like hothouse sunflowers among the rows of weeds that were the rented houses. — 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

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. — Toni Morrison

While they are busy showing off, digging other people's graves, hanging themselves on a cross, running wild in the streets, cherries are quietly turning from green to red, oysters are suffering pearls, and children are catching rain in their mouths expecting the drops to be cold but they're not; they are warm and smell like pineapple before they get heavier and heavier, so heavy and fast they can't be caught one at a time. Poor swimmers head for shore while strong ones wait for lightning's silver veins. Bottle-green clouds sweep in, pushing the rain inland where palm trees pretend to be shocked by the wind. — Toni Morrison

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. — 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

You do not deserve love regardless of the suffering you have endured. You do not deserve love because somebody did you wrong. You do not deserve love just because you want it. You can only earn
by practice and careful contemplation
the right to express it and you have to learn how to accept it. Which is to say you have to earn God. You have to practice God. You have to think God
carefully. And f you are a good and diligent student you may secure the right to show love. Love is not a gift. It is a diploma. A diploma conferring certain privileges; the privilege of expressing love and the privilege of receiving it.
How do you know you have graduated? You don't. — Toni Morrison

She knew from personal experience how hard loving was, how selfish and how easily sundered. Withholding sex or relying on it, ignoring children or devouring them, rerouting true feelings or locking them out. Youth being the excuse for that fortune-cookie love - until it wasn't, until it became pure adult stupidity. — Toni Morrison

I didn't fall in love, I rose in it. — Toni Morrison

The plight (and resistance) of children living in a wholly commercialized environment that equates "entertainment" with happiness, products with status, "things" with love, and that is terrified of the free (meaning un-commodified, unpurchaseable) imagination of the young. (Although children participate enthusiastically in the "love me so buy me" pattern, I think they are taught to think that way and that on some deep level they know what is being substituted.)- Tony Morrison -Interview - (The Big Box) — Toni Morrison

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

We were two throats and one eye and we had no price. — Toni Morrison

My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren't my children. — Toni Morrison

How soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like forever. As though there never was a time when they didn't love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves. — Toni Morrison

All of that art-for-art's-sake stuff is BS," she declares. "What are these people talking about? Are you really telling me that Shakespeare and Aeschylus weren't writing about kings? All good art is political! There is none that isn't. And the ones that try hard not to be political are political by saying, 'We love the status quo.' We've just dirtied the word 'politics,' made it sound like it's unpatriotic or something." Morrison laughs derisively. "That all started in the period of state art, when you had the communists and fascists running around doing this poster stuff, and the reaction was 'No, no, no; there's only aesthetics.' My point is that is has to be both: beautiful and political at the same time. I'm not interested in art that is not in the world. And it's not just the narrative, it's not just the story; it's the language and the structure and what's going on behind it. Anybody can make up a story. — Toni Morrison

All she saw, down in the cellar well beneath the stoop, was a light yellow feather with a tip of green. And she had never named him. Had called him "my parrot" all these years. "My parrot." "Love you. "Love you."
Did the dogs get him? Or did he get the message - that she said, "My parrot" and he said, "Love you," and she had never said it back or even taken the trouble to name him - and manage somehow to fly away on wings that had not soared for six years. — 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

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

They encouraged you to put some of your weight in their hands and soon as you felt how light and lovely it was, they studied your scars and tribulations ... — Toni Morrison

Don't love her too much. Don't. Maybe it's still in her the thing that makes it all right to kill her children. I have to tell her. I have to protect her. — Toni Morrison

You looked at me then like you knew me, and I thought it really was Eden, and I couldn't take your eyes in because I was loving the hoof marks on your cheeks. — 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

Which was what love was: unmotivated respect. — Toni Morrison

Don't beg anybody for anything, especially love. — Toni Morrison

Unless carefree, mother love was a killer. — Toni Morrison

I can't tell you why I was in love with her. People didn't require that much as they do now. Folks were expected to be civilized to one another, honest, and - and clear. You relied on people being what they said they were, because there was no other way to survive. — Toni Morrison

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

I love Toni Morrison and Jeanette Winterson. 'The Passion' is my favourite book. — Vanessa Diffenbaugh

To get to a place where you could love anything you chose
not to need permission for desire
well now _that_ was freedom. — Toni Morrison

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

Hospitality is gold in this City; you have to be clever to figure out how to be welcoming and defensive at the same time. When to love something and when to quit. If you don't know how, you can end up out of control or controlled by some outside thing like that hard case last winter. — Toni Morrison

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

You want a real thing?" asked Alice. "I'll tell you a real one. You got anything left to you to love, anything at all, do it. — Toni Morrison

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

She loved nothing in the world except this woman's son, wanted him alive more than anybody, but hadn't the least bit of control over the predator that lived inside her. Totally taken over by her anaconda love, she had no self left, no fears, no wants, no intelligence that was her own [ ... ] Ruth heard the supplication in her words and it seemed to her that she was not looking at a person but at an impulse, a cell, a red corpuscle that neither knows nor understands why it is driven to spend its whole life in one pursuit: swimming up a dark tunnel toward the muscle of a heart or an eye's nerve end that it both nourished and fed from. — Toni Morrison

I eat kung pao chicken like it's going out of style, but I'm pretty sure I don't have an Asian cell in my body. I love Toni Morrison novels although I'm not black. I'm straight and I'm happily married. The reason I work here is because I think you deserve that, too. — Jodi Picoult

Love just seems to make life not just livable, but a gallant, gallant event. — Toni Morrison

Guileless and without vanity,we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our own skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness. — Toni Morrison

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. — Toni Morrison

I didn't even know his name. And if I didn't know his name then there is nothing I did know and I have known nothing ever at all since the one thing I wanted was to know his name so how could he help but leave me since he was making love to a woman who didn't even know his name. — Toni Morrison

And for a reason he still did not understand, he began to cry. Love plain, simple, and so fast it shattered him. — Toni Morrison

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 ... — Toni Morrison

And they beat. The women for having known them and no more, no more; the children for having been them but never again. They killed a boss so often and so completely they had to bring him back to life to pulp him one more time. Tasting hot mealcake among pine trees, they beat it away. Singing love songs to Mr. Death, they smashed his head. More than the rest, they killed the flirt whom folks called Life for leading them on. — Toni Morrison

My melancholy thoughts are back.
But I still love the idea of love. — Toni Morrison

A twenty-year-old man so in love with his mother he gave up five years of Sabbaths just to see her sit down for a change — Toni Morrison

The best hiding place was love. Thus the conversion from pristine sadism to fabricated hatred, to fraudulent love. — Toni Morrison

Do they still call it infatuation? That magic ax that chops away the world in one blow, leaving only the couple standing there trembling? Whatever they call it, it leaps over anything, takes the biggest chair, the largest slice, rules the ground wherever it walks, from a mansion to a swamp, and its selfishness is its beauty ... People with no imagination feed it with sex
the clown of love. They don't know the real kinds, the better kinds, where losses are cut and everybody benefits. It takes a certain intelligence to love like that
softly, without props. — Toni Morrison

I don't want to be free of you because I am alive only with you. — Toni Morrison

I know it's trash: just another story made up to scare wicked females and correct unruly children. But it's all I have. I know I need something else. Something better. Like a story that shows how brazen women can take a good man down. I can hum to that. — Toni Morrison

I took a couple of creative writing classes with Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton University, and in my senior year there, I took a long fiction workshop with Toni Morrison. I fell in love with it. — Mohsin Hamid

So it was just herself. In this world with these people she wanted to be the person who would never again need rescue. Not from Lenore through the lies of the Rat, not from Dr. Beau through the courage of Sarah and her brother. [...] She wanted to be the one who rescued her own self. [...] Wishing would not make it so, nor would blame, but thinking might. If she did not respect herself, why should anybody else? — Toni Morrison

Love is never any better than the lover. — Toni Morrison

He must rest his weight on his elbows when they make love, ostensibly to avoid hurting her breasts but actually to keep her from having to touch or feel too much of him. While — Toni Morrison

Gimme hate, Lord," he whimpered. "I'll take hate any day. But don't give me love. I can't take no more love, Lord. I can't carry it ... It's too heavy. Jesus, you know, you know all about it. Ain't it heavy? Jesus? Ain't love heavy? — Toni Morrison

It hit her like a sledgehammer, and it was then that she knew what to feel. A liquid trail of hate flooded her chest.
Knowing that she would hate him long and well filled her with pleasant anticipation, like when you know you are going to fall in love with someone and you wait for the happy signs. Hating BoyBoy, she could get on with it, and have the safety, the thrill, the consistency of that hatred as long as she wanted or needed it to define and strengthen her or protect her from routine vulnerabilities. — Toni Morrison

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