Toni Morrison quotes

Born
February 18, 1931 Lorain, Ohio, U.S.

Died
August 5, 2019.

Occupation
Novelist.

Toni Morrison is an American novelist.

If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.
– Toni Morrison

Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.
– Toni Morrison

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.
– Toni Morrison

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

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.
– Toni Morrison

Make a difference about something other than yourselves.
– Toni Morrison

It’s been mentioned or suggested that Paradise will not be well studied, because it’s about this unimportant intellectual topic, which is religion.
– Toni Morrison

Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.
– Toni Morrison

If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.
– Toni Morrison

In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it’s nothing else but color.
– Toni Morrison

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

I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can’t teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort.
– Toni Morrison

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

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.
– 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

There is nothing of any consequence in education, in the economy, in city planning, in social policy that does not concern black people.
– Toni Morrison

Everything I’ve ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.
– Toni Morrison

In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.
– Toni Morrison

Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.
– Toni Morrison

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.
– Toni Morrison

Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
– Toni Morrison

I’m not entangled in shaping my work according to other people’s views of how I should have done it.
– Toni Morrison

As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.
– Toni Morrison

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

Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers.
– Toni Morrison

I like marriage. The idea.
– Toni Morrison

You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone.
– Toni Morrison

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.
– Toni Morrison

I get angry about things, then go on and work.
– Toni Morrison

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

When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.
– Toni Morrison

The body is ready to have babies. Nature wants it done then, when the body can handle it, not after 40, when the income can handle it.
– Toni Morrison