Toni Morrison Quotes: 22

• If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

• You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.

  Song of Solomon

• Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

  Beloved

• We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

• Make up a story... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.

  The Nobel Lecture In Literature, 1993

• 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.

  Beloved

• Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.

  Jazz

• She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it's there, because it can't hurt, and because what difference does it make?

  Song of Solomon

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

• 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.

  The Bluest Eye

• The function of freedom is to free someone else.

• If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.

  Song of Solomon

• There is really nothing more to say-except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.

• Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.

  Beloved

• 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]

• All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

• 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.

• Writing is really a way of thinking--not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.

• She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.

• Birth, life, and death― each took place on the hidden side of a leaf.

• I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life.

• I'm a Midwesterner, and everyone in Ohio is excited. I'm also a New Yorker, and a New Jerseyan, and an American, plus I'm an African-American, and a woman. I know it seems like I'm spreading like algae when I put it this way, but I'd like to think of the prize being distributed to these regions and nations and races.