Quotes from Toni Morrison

Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth.

And wouldn't you know he'd be a singing man.

The enemy is not men. The enemy is the concept of patriarchy, the concept of patriarchy as the way to run the world or do things.

When a man angers you, he conquers you.

Racism will disappear when it's no longer profitable, and no longer psychologically useful. And when that happens, it'll be gone. But at the moment, people make a lot of money off of it, pro and con.

Grown don't mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What's that supposed to mean? In my heart it don't mean a thing.

Misery colored by the greens and blues in my mother's voice took away all the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet.

I sang "O Holy Night" in a school choir. My mother came and listened to me and complimented me. So that was the high point. I cannot sing a note.

At some point in life, the world's beauty becomes enough.

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.

The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Shallow believers prefer a shallow God.

You looking good." "Devil's confusion. He lets me look good long as I feel bad.

If happiness is anticipation with certainty, we were happy.

I want to feel what I feel. What's mine. Even if it's not happiness, whatever that means. Because you're all you've got.

My world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.

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.

No gasp at a miracle that is truly miraculous because the magic lies in the fact that you knew it was there for you all along.

Our ancestors are an ever widening circle of hope.