Toni Morrison quotes - page 5

if they put an iron circle around your neck I will bite it away. (Toni Morrison)
Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging. View quote
Toni Morrison
Pain. I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweettooth for it. Bolts of lightning, little rivulets of thunder. And I the eye of the storm. View quote
Toni Morrison
A dream is just a nightmare with lipstick. View quote
Toni Morrison
Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do. View quote
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... View quote
Toni Morrison
She learned the intricacy of loneliness: the horror of color, the roar of soundlessness and the menace of familiar objects lying still. View quote
Toni Morrison
the hopelessness that comes from knowing too little and feeling too much (so brittle, so dry he is in danger of the reverse: feeling nothing and knowing everything) View quote
Toni Morrison
Writing is really a way of thinking--not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet. View quote
Toni Morrison
To be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing. View quote
Toni Morrison
The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over. (Toni Morrison)
Sunk in the grass of an empty lot on a spring Saturday, I split the stems of milkweed and thought about ants and peach pits and death and where the world went when I closed my eyes. View quote
Toni Morrison
There in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning. View quote
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. View quote
Toni Morrison
Every now and then she looked around for tangible evidence of his having ever been there. Where were the butterflies? the blueberries? the whistling reed? She could find nothing, for he had left nothing but his stunning absence. View quote
Toni Morrison
Everything depends on knowing how much,” she said, and "Good is knowing when to stop. View quote
Toni Morrison
How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it. View quote
Toni Morrison
Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live. View quote
Toni Morrison
In Ohio seasons are theatrical. Each one enters like a prima donna, convinced its performance is the reason the world has people in it. View quote
Toni Morrison
Love is divine only and difficult always. View quote
Toni Morrison
Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now. (Toni Morrison)
you got two feet, Sethe, not four." he said, and right then a forest sprang up between them; tactless and quiet. View quote
Toni Morrison
... the change was adjustment without improvement. View quote
Toni Morrison
When I write, I don't translate for white readers.... Dostoevski wrote for a Russian audience, but we're able to read him. If I'm specific, and I don't overexplain, then anyone can overhear me. View quote
Toni Morrison
Was there anything so loathsome as a wilfully innocent man? Hardly. An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines. View quote
Toni Morrison