Words matter. These are the best Toni Morrison Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can’t teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort.
I don’t think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It’s perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man.
Women’s rights is not only an abstraction, a cause; it is also a personal affair. It is not only about us; it is also about me and you. Just the two of us.
I’m always annoyed about why black people have to bear the brunt of everybody else’s contempt. If we are not totally understanding and smiling, suddenly we’re demons.
Somebody has to take responsibility for being a leader.
There is really nothing more to say – except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.
Make a difference about something other than yourselves.
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.
Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.
For a long time I was convinced that the conflict between Jewish people and black people in this country was a media event.
There is nothing of any consequence in education, in the economy, in city planning, in social policy that does not concern black people.
Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.
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.
The unflattering reviews are painful for short periods of time; the badly written ones are deeply, deeply insulting. That reviewer took no time to really read the book.
Nelson Mandela is, for me, the single statesman in the world. The single statesman, in that literal sense, who is not solving all his problems with guns. It’s truly unbelievable.
I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.
My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren’t my children.
The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.
I don’t think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they’re black or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money. That’s what we’re upset about.
If you’re going to hold someone down you’re going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.
As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.
I’m not entangled in shaping my work according to other people’s views of how I should have done it.
A lot of black people believe that Jews in this country have become white. They behave like white people rather than Jewish people.
I like marriage. The idea.
I get angry about things, then go on and work.
No one ever talks about the moment you found that you were white. Or the moment you found out you were black. That’s a profound revelation. The minute you find that out, something happens. You have to renegotiate everything.
Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.
It’s been mentioned or suggested that Paradise will not be well studied, because it’s about this unimportant intellectual topic, which is religion.
I merged those two words, black and feminist, because I was surrounded by black women who were very tough and and who always assumed they had to work and rear children and manage homes.
