Quotes from Toni Morrison

Perhaps that's what all human relationships boiled down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?

From my point of view, which is that of a storyteller, I see your life as something artful, waiting, just waiting and ready for you to make it art.

The past is interesting to me because it's been dumbed down or flattened out, or academically nitpicked so you can't get any life out of it, you just get data.

Anything dead coming back to life hurts.

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

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

Long before I was a success, my parents made me feel like I could be one.

Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.

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

Most of the really good literature I've read in my life was political, meaning it was important - about something going on in the history of the world - or contemporary.

I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway.

There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

Schools must stop being holding pens to keep energetic young people off the job market and off the streets. We stretch puberty out a long, long time.

You marvel at the economy and this choice of words. How many ways can you describe the sky and the moon? After Sylvia Plath, what can you say?

For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.

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.

For a long time I was convinced that the conflict between Jewish people and black people in this country was a media event.

The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.

The language must be careful and must appear effortless. It must not sweat. It must suggest and be provocative at the same time.

I think one of the reasons I'm so thrilled with writing is because it is an act of reading for me at the same time, which is why my revisions are so sustained.

The unflattering reviews are painful for short periods of time; the badly written ones are deeply, deeply insulting. That reviewer took no time to really read the book.

Deep, deep trouble. Can't rival the dead for love. Lose every time.

I feel like today we always glorify the young, just-plucked-from-college writer. But it's much harder to start writing later, in middle age, struggling on a book around a full-time job and family.

I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.