Quotes from Toni Morrison

Never seek out your own face even when well, lest the reflection drink your soul.

Somehow, some way, the child assuaged the tiny yet eternal yearning for the home Lina once knew where everyone had anything and no one had everything.

He didn't mean it. It happened before he was through. She'd stepped away from him to pick flowers, returned, and at the sound of her footsteps behind him, he'd turned around before he was through. It was becoming a habit - this concentration on things behind him. Almost as though there were no future to be had.

Mother hunger - to be one or have one - both of them were reeling from that long which, Lina knew, remained alive, traveling the bone.

In Ohio the seasons are theatrical.

But the important thing is that I don't do anything else. I avoid social life normally associated with publishing. I don't go to the cocktail parties, I don't give or go to dinner parties. I need that time in the evening because I can do a tremendous amount of work then. And I can concentrate. When I sit down to write I never brood. I have so many other things to do, with my children and teaching, that I can't afford it...

I stroked every inch of his golden skin. Sucked his earlobes. I know the quality of the hair in his armpit. I fingered the dimples in his upper lip. I poured red wine in his navel and drank its spill. There's no place on my body his lips did not turn into bolts of lightning. Oh God..I have to stop reliving our lovemaking. I have to forget how new it felt every single time. Both fresh and somehow eternal. I'm tone deaf, but fucking him made me sing.

Being a black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from. It doesn't limit my imagination; it expands it," Toni Morrison, who turns eighty-eight today

deathbreath was a prime creator, a great changer of minds and collector of hearts. Any decision made while inhaling it was as unreliable as it was fierce. Reason in moments of crisis was rare.

And all he could say was that he did not know. He was guilty, therefore, of innocence. Was there anything so loathsome as a willfully innocent man? Hardly. An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore unworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.

Rebekka's understanding of God was faint, except as a larger kind of king, but she quieted the shame of insufficient devotion by assuming that He could be no grander nor better than the imagination of the believer. Shallow believers preferred a shallow god. The timid enjoyed a rampaging avenging god.

Every dictator gets rid of the artist first... They burn the books and execute the artist first... Art might do something. It's dangerous.

There can't be anyone, I am sure, who doesn't know what it feels like to be disliked, even rejected, momentarily or for sustained periods of time. Perhaps the feeling is merely indifference, mild annoyance, but it may also be hurt.

At some point in life the world's beautify becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.

the wide untrammeled space that once thrilled her became vacancy. A commanding and oppressive absence. She learned the intricacy of loneliness: the horror of color, the roar of soundlessness and the menace of familiar objects lying still.

And if you have the emotional strength and/or support from family and friends, the damage is reduced or erased. We think of it as the stress (minor or disabling) that is part of life as a human.

With you my body is pleasure is safe is belonging. I can never not have you have me.

Ruth looked for the water mark several times during the day. 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.

All of us—all who knew her—felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her.

Era peligroso que una mujer que había sido esclava amara tanto algo, especialmente si ese algo eran sus propios hijos. Él sabía que lo mejor era querer un poquito, quererlo todo pero solo un poquito, de modo que cuando les rompieran la espalda o los arrojaran en un saco de desperdicios, te quedara un poco de amor para el siguiente

You born here? Naw. Down south. Jacksonville, Florida. Bad country, boy. Bad, bad country. You know they ain't even got an orphanage in Jacksonville where colored babies can go? They have to put 'em in jail. I tell people that talk about them sit ins I was raised in jail, and it don't scare me none.

His business was dread. People came to him in dread, whispered in dread, wept and pleaded in dread. And dread was what he counseled.

Have you ever seen the way a cloud loves a mountain? from Song of Solomon

Tu espalda tiene un árbol. En flor. Me pregunto en qué estaría pensando Dios. Yo también he recibido mis buenos azotes pero no recuerdo nada como esto.