Quotes from Toni Morrison

Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There

God puzzled her and she was too ashamed of Him to say so.

How long can news function as a palliative for despair and counter space for products? It is so frustrating and sad to open a newspaper and find the news literally at the edges, like the embroidered hem of the real subject – advertisement. The media spectacle must not continue to direct its attention to the manufacture of consent, rather than debate with more than two sides, to the reinforcement of untruths, and a review of what else there is to buy.

Here Stands A Man. Wishful thinking, perhaps, but he could have sworn the sweet bay was pleased to agree. Its olive-green leaves went wild in the glow of a fat cherry-red sun.

There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks.

to eat, walk and sleep anywhere was life as good as it got.

Somewhere inside you is that free person I'm talking about. Locate her and let her do some good in the world

I suspect that a nonracist, nonsexist, educating press is as profitable as one that is not. I suspect that clarification of difficult issues is just as entertaining as obscuring and reducing them is. But it will take more than an effort of the will to make such a press profitable; it will take imagination, invention, and a strong sense of responsibility and accountability.

Cuanto más se esforzaba la gente de color por convencerlos de lo buenos que eran, de lo inteligentes y cariñosos, de lo humanos que eran, cuanto más se esforzaban los negros en persuadir a los blancos de algo que a sus ojos estaba fuera de toda duda, más profunda e intrincada crecía la selva en su interior.

Say it, please, she urged. Please. And hurry. Hurry. I've got things to do.

You have to understand that, Lord. You said, Suffer little children to come unto me, and harm them not. Did you forget? Did you forget about the children? Yes. You forgot. You let them go wanting, sit on road shoulders, crying next to their dead mothers. I've seen them charred, lame, halt. You forgot, Lord. You forgot how and when to be God.

The righteous look every Negro learned to recognize along with his ma'am's tit. Like a flag hoisted, this righteousness telegraphed and announced the faggot, the whip, the fist, the lie, long before it went public.

florens would sigh then, her head on lina's shoulder and when sleep came the little girl's smiel lingered. mother hunger – to be one or have one – both of them were reeling from that longing which, lina knes, remained alive, traveling to the bone.

Don't mistake the fathers' thanks, Fairy had warned her. Men scared of us, always will be. To them we're death's handmaiden standing as between them and the children their wives carry. During those times, Fairy said, the midwife is the interference, the one giving orders, on whose secret skill so much depended, and the dependency irritated them. Especially here in this place where they had come to multiply in peace.

It was an opportunity to intervene at the heart of the problem: to bring God and language to natives who were assumed to have neither; to alter their diets, their clothes, their minds; to help them despise everything that had once made their lives worthwhile and to offer them instead the privilege of knowing the one and only God and a chance, thereby, for redemption. (227)

I don't think many people appreciate silence or realize that it is as close to music as you can get

To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay.

That's something you will have- a broken heart.

What you reckon make him do a thing like that? Beats me. Just nasty. Well, they ought to take her out of school. Ought to. She carry some of the blame. Oh, come on. She ain't but twelve or so. Yeah. But you never know. How come she didn't fight him?

How loose the silk. How quick the jailed up flavor ran free.

Saying more might push them both to a place they couldn't get back from. He would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut.

Art is not mere entertainment or decoration, it has meaning, and we both want and need to fathom that meaning – not fear, dismiss, or construct superficial responses told to us by authorities.

Their children were like distant but exposed wounds whose aches were no less intimate because separate from their flesh. They had looked at the world and back at their children, back at the world and back again at their children, and Sula knew that one clear young eye was all that kept the knife away from the throat's curve.

And I believe our sorrow was the more intense because nobody else seemed to share it. They were disgusted, amused, shocked, outraged, or even excited by the story. But we listened for the one who would say, Poor little girl, or Poor baby, but there was only head-wagging where those words should have been. We looked for eyes creased with concern, but saw only veils.