Toni Morrison Quotes

Author Image

Toni Morrison

Profession : Novelist

Birth : February 18, 1931

If you surrender to the wind, you can ride it.

Toni Morrison

Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich inherit it. I don't mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network.

Toni Morrison

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

Toni Morrison

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.

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

I like marriage. The idea.

Toni Morrison

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

Toni Morrison

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

Toni Morrison

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

Toni Morrison

Make a difference about something other than yourselves.

Toni Morrison

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

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

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

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.

Toni Morrison

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.

Toni Morrison

Somebody has to take responsibility for being a leader.

Toni Morrison

A lot of black people believe that Jews in this country have become white. They behave like white people rather than Jewish people.

Toni Morrison

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

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

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

Toni Morrison