Quotes from Toni Morrison

Yummy food, unique attention, playfulness, or loving sternness—these features are often summoned to sweeten one's memory of a grandmother.

A perfect thing is not everything.

To the two who gave me life and the one who made me free

She spent her days, her tendril, sap-green days, walking up and down, up and down, her head jerking to the beat of a drummer so distant only she could hear. Elbows bent, hands on shoulders, she flailed her arms like a bird in an eternal, grotesquely futile effort to fly.

she was the dumbest bitch on the planet.

From deep inside, her laughter came like the sound of many rivers, freely, deeply, muddily, heading for the room of an open sea.

She knew it was there, would always be there, but she needed to confirm its presence. Like the keeper of the lighthouse and the prisoner, she regarded it as a mooring, a checkpoint, some stable visual object that assured her that the world was still there; that this was life and not a dream. That she was alive somewhere, inside, which she acknowledged to be true only because a thing she knew intimately was out there, outside herself.

The scholarship that looks into the mind, imagination, and behavior of slaves is valuable. But equally valuable is a serious intellectual effort to see what racial ideology does to the mind, imagination, and behavior of maters.

Maybe everybody has a renegade tongue yearning to be on its own.

He wanted her in that room with him giving him the balance he was losing, the ballast and counterweight to the stone of sorrow New York City had given him.

a dream is just a nightmare with lipstick

The thrill that came with each blow was wonderfully familiar. Unable to stop and unwilling to, Frank kept going even though the big man was unconscious. The women stopped clawing each other and pulled at Frank's collar.

We tend to overlook goodness, but we must put goodness front and center in our lives.

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

From the windows, through the fur of snow, the landscape became more melancholy when the sun successfully brightened the quiet trees, unable to speak without their leaves.

He sighed over the problem: a furnace seldom needed in that climate seemed as confused about its workings as he was.

I wanted to redirect, reinvent the political, cultural, and artistic judgments saved for African American writers.

Tears streamed down his face and he cradled the barrel of the shotgun in his arms as though it were the woman he had been begging for, searching for, all his life. Gimme hate, Lord, he whimpered. I'll take hate any day . But don't give me love. I can't take no more love, Lord. I can't carry it. It's too heavy.

It withheld the refreshment in a sleep slept on it. It imposed a furtiveness on the loving done on it. Like a sore tooth that is not content to throb in isolation, but must diffuse its own pain to other parts of the body—making breathing difficult, vision limited, nerves unsettled, so a hated piece of furniture produces a fretful malaise that asserts itself throughout the house and limits the delight of things not related to it.           The

Scary things not always outside. Most scary things is inside.

Originally, Sula opened with 'Except for World War II, nothing interfered with National Suicide Day.' With some encouragement I recognized that sentence as a false beginning." Falseness, in this case, meant abrupt. There was no lobby, as it were, where the reader could be situated before being introduced to the goings-on of the characters.

My preference was the demolition of the lobby altogether. [Of all of my books], only Sula has this 'entrance.' The others refuse the 'presentation,' refuse the seductive safe harbor; the line of demarcation between…them and us. Refuse, in effect, to cater to the diminished expectations of the reader, or his or her alarm heightened by the emotional luggage one carries into the black-topic text….

Fire. How quick. How purposefully it ate whatever had been built, what had been life. Cleansing somehow and scandalous in beauty.

You could get slaves to do anything at all, bear anything, if you gave them any hope that they could keep their children.