Quotes from Toni Morrison

Nevertheless, remembering how the curate described what existed before creation, Scully saw dark matter out there, thick, unknowable, aching to made into a world.

I must confess, though, that I sometimes lose interest in the characters and get much more interested in the trees and animals. I think I exercise tremendous restraint in this, but my editor says, 'Would you stop this beauty business.' And I say, 'Wait, wait until I tell you about these ants.

Narrative fiction provides a controlled wilderness, an opportunity to be and to become the Other. The stranger. With sympathy, clarity, and the risk of self-examination.

Can't nothing heal without pain, you know.

As in the case of many misanthropes, his disdain for people led him into a profession designed to serve them.

After Hiroshima, the musicians understood as early as anyone that Truman's bomb changed everything and only scat and bebop could say how.

I can say that my narrative project is as difficult today as it was then.

What is the nature of Othering's comfort, its allure, its power (social, psychological, or economical)? Is it the thrill of belonging - which implies being part of something bigger than one's solo self, and therefore stronger? My initial view leans toward the social/psychological need for a stranger, an Other in order to define the estranged self (the crowd seeker is always the lonely one).

Exactly the way old folks said: not when you call Him; not when you want Him; only when you need Him and right on time.

He dragged her under him and made love to her with the steadiness and the intensity of a man about to leave for Dayton.

Clearing damp and gasping for breath. In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart. She did not tell them to clean up their lives or go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glory bound pure. She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it.

I didn't fall in love, I rose in it. I saw you and made up my mind. My mind. And I made up my mind to follow you too.

A poisoned silence floated through the rooms like a big fishnet that Violet alone slashed through with loud recriminations.

But there is nothing to beat what the City can make of a nightsky. It can empty itself of surface, and more like the ocean than the ocean itself, go deep, starless. … It can go purple and keep an orange heart so the clothes of the people on the streets glow like dance-hall costumes.

Probably best, he thought. If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up. Still. . . if her boys were gone . . .

No, really. Just quiet. Nothing louder than waves lapping or ice melting in crystal glasses.

If there's a book you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

More awful than the fear of danger was the fear of looking foolish—of being excited when others were laid back—of being somehow manipulated

Adam first, Eve next, and also, confused about her role, the first outlaw?

Criticism as a form of knowledge is capable of robbing literature not only of its own implicit and explicit ideology but of its ideas as well; it can dismiss the difficult, arduous work writers do to make an art that becomes and remains part of and significant within a human landscape.

Let me tell you right now the one important thing you'll ever need to know: Own things. And let the things you own own other things. Then you'll own yourself and other people too.

I can never not have you have me.

Él, Dios, había cometido un desastroso e imperdonable error de juicio: diseñar un universo imperfecto.

They were troublesome thoughts, but they wouldn't go away. Under the moon, on the ground, alone, with not even the sound of baying dogs to remind him that he was with other people, his self--the cocoon that was personality--gave way. He could barely see his own hand, and couldn't see his feet. He was only his breath, coming slower now, and his thoughts. The rest of him disappeared. So the thoughts came, unobstructed by other people, by things, even by the sight of himself.