Quotes from Toni Morrison

I am alarmed by the violence that women do to one another: professional violence, competitive violence, emotional violence. I am alarmed by the willingness of women to enslave other women. I am alarmed by a growing absence of decency on the killing floor of professional women's worlds.

Homelessness has been recharacterized as streetlessness. Not the poor deprived of homes, but the homed being deprived of their streets.

Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs—all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured. "Here," they said, "this is beautiful, and if you are on this day 'worthy' you may have it.

For a nickel a month, Lady Jones did what whitepeople thought unnecessary if not illegal: crowded her little parlor with the colored children who had time for and interest in book learning.

This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. 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.

How loose the silk. How jailed down the juice.

How can he not love your hair? It's the same hair that grows out of his own armpits. The same hair that crawls up out his crotch on up his stomach. All over his chest. The very same. It grows out of his nose, over his lips, and if he ever lost his razor it would grow all over his face. It's all over his head, Hagar. It's his hair too. He got to love it.

If I hadn't trained Lula Ann properly she wouldn't have known to always cross the street and avoid white boys.

I think long and carefully about what novels ought to do. They should clarify the roles that have become obscured; they ought to identify those things in the past that are useful and those things that are not; and they ought to give nourishment.

Nuns go by as quiet as lust, and drunken men with sober eyes sing in the lobby of the Greek hotel.

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.

You are nothing but wilderness. No constraint. No mind. You shout the word—mind, mind, mind—over and over and then you laugh, saying as I live and breathe, a slave by choice.

What a man leaves behind is what a man is.

The sad thing was that Pauline did not really care for clothes and makeup. She merely wanted other women to cast favorable glances her way.

For the mouths of her children quickly forgot the taste of her nipples, and years ago they had begun to look past her face into the nearest stretch of sky.

My nature is a quiet one, anyway. As a child I was considered respectful; as a young woman I was called discreet. Later on I was thought to have the wisdom maturity brings.

Did you do it yet? He was like a teen-age girl wondering about the virginity of her friend, the friend who has a look, a manner newly minted––different, separate, focused somehow. Did you do it yet? Do you know something both exotic and ordinary that I have not felt? Do you now know what it's like to risk your one and only self? How did it feel? Were you afraid? Did it change you? And if I do it, will it change me too?

He screamed and shouted 'Wooeeeee!' at Guitar's list, but because his life was not unpleasant and even had a certain amount of luxury in addition to its comfort, he felt off center. He just wanted to beat a path away from his parents' past, which was also their present and which was threatening to become his present as well.

Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn't get interested in leaving life or living it.

They did not believe death was accidental—life might be, but death was deliberate.

Instead of ignoring her infirmity, pretending it was not there, he made it seem like something special and endearing. For the first time Pauline felt that her bad foot was an asset

I don't want to be a free nigger; I want to be a free man." "Don't we all. Look. Be what you want--- white or black. Choose. But if you choose black, you got to act black, meaning draw your manhood up—quicklike, and don't bring me no whiteboy sass." Hunter's Hunter and Godlen Gray

She herself was no longer a child. So she became, and her process of becoming was like most of ours: she developed a hatred for things that mystified or obstructed her; acquired virtues that were easy to maintain; assigned herself a role in the scheme of things; and harked back to simpler times for gratification.

We don't need any more writers as solitary heroes. We need a heroic writer's movement: assertive, militant, pugnacious.