Quotes from Toni Morrison

I refused to explain, or even acknowledge, the "problem" as anything other than an artistic one.

To use folk language, vernacular in a manner neither exotic nor comic, neither minstrelized nor microscopically analyzed.

Hi, dumplin'. Where your socks?" Marie seldom called Pecola the same thing twice, but invariably her epithets were fond ones chosen from menus and dishes that were forever uppermost in her mind.

The best thing was to love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well maybe you'd have a little love left over for the next one.

Before the cook arrived when she stood in a space no wider than a bench is long, back behind and to the left of the milk cans. Working dough. Working, working dough. Nothing better than that to start the day's serious work of beating back the past.

A daughter is a woman that cares about where she come from and takes care of them that took care of her.

The sky above them was another country. Winter stars, close enough to lick, had come out before sunset. For a moment, looking up, Sethe entered the perfect peace they offered.

Two pennies and an insult were well spent if it meant seeing the spectacle of whitefolks making a spectacle of themselves.

Her garden was not Eden; it was so much more than that.

Move. Walk. Run. Hide. Steal and move on.

In 1983 I lost my job—or left it. One, the other, or both. In any case, I had been part-time for a while, coming into the publishing house one day a week to do the correspondence-telephoning-meetings that were part of the job; editing manuscripts at home.

Black women were armed; black women were dangerous and the less money they had the deadlier the weapon they chose.

There was nobody but me to take care of me so I invented myself, toughened myself.

They settled into the long learning of one another: preferences, habits altered, others acquired; disagreement without bile; trust and that wordless conversation that years of companionship rest on.

Beloved wasn't interested. She said when she cried there was no one. That dead men lay on top of her. That she had nothing to eat. Ghosts without skin stick their fingers in her and said beloved in the dark and bitch in the light.

L'amore non è mai migliore di chi ama. I malvagi amano con malvagità, i violenti con violenza, i deboli con debolezza e gli stupidi in modo stupido, ma l'amore di un uomo libero non è mai sicuro. on c'è dono per la persona amata. Solo chi ama possiede il suo dono d'amore. Chi è amato viene reciso, neutralizzato, congelato nello sguardo dell'occhio interiore di chi ama.

to get to a place where you could love anything you chose—not to need permission for desire—well now, that was freedom.

So he had said always, so she would not have to be afraid of the change—the falling away of skin, the drip and slide of blood, and the exposure of bones underneath. He had said always to convince her, assure her, of permanency.

She went to bed with men as frequently as she could. It was the only place where she could find what she was looking for: misery and the ability to feel deep sorrow.

Well, feel this, why don't you? Feel how it feels to have a bed to sleep in and somebody there not worrying you to death about what you got to do each day to deserve it. Feel how that feels. And if that don't get it, feel how it feels to be a colouredwoman roaming the roads with anything God made liable to jump on you. Feel that.

Her eyes, fixed on the window, are so expressionless he is not sure she will know who he is. There is too much light here in this room. Things look sold.

Nothing was out there that this sister-girl did not provide in abundance: a racing heart, dreaminess, society, danger, beauty. She swallowed twice to prepare for the telling, to construct out of the strings she had heard all her life a net to hold beloved.

Beloved so agitated she behaved like a two-year-old.

Being a minority in both caste and class, we moved about anyway on the hem of life, struggling to consolidate our weaknesses and hang on, or to creep singly up into the major folds of the garment.