Quotes from Toni Morrison

Love just seems to make life not just livable, but a gallant, gallant event.

In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it's nothing else but color.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers.

I sometimes lose interest in the characters and get much more interested in the trees and animals.

Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God.

Unless carefree, mother love was a killer.

If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, you must be the one to write it.

I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.

One of my kids was born in 1968. There were going to be political difficulties, but they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to.

When they fall in love with a city, it is for forever and it is like forever.

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

Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It's not having no responsibilitie s; it's choosing the ones you want.

My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren't my children.

You looked at me then like you knew me, and I thought it really was Eden, and I couldn't take your eyes in because I was loving the hoof marks on your cheeks.

To get to a place where you could love anything you chose--not to need permission for desire--well now _that_ was freedom.

Love is divine only and difficult always.

Nobody loved her and she wouldn't have liked it if they had, she considered love a serious disability.

Home is memory, home is your history, home is where you work. Some people want to abandon it and become truly local. But the questions are all there.

Intimacy is extremely important to me and I want it to be extremely important to the readers.

There is nothing of any consequence in education, in the economy, in city planning, in social policy that does not concern black people.

If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.

Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.

We were two throats and one eye and we had no price.