Quotes from Toni Morrison

Virginia law, in 1831, is instructive and representative.

She loved nothing in the world except this woman's son, wanted him alive more than anybody, but hadn't the least bit of control over the predator that lived inside her. Totally taken over by her anaconda love, she had no self left, no fears, no wants, no intelligence that was her own.

It was there I learned how I was not a person from my country, nor from my families. I was negrita. Everything. Language, dress, gods, dance, habits, decoration, song - all of it cooked together in the color of my skin.

That is what indices are like, of course. Not the fan-shaped spread of rice bursting from a gunnysack. Not the thunder roll of barrels of turpentine cascading down a plank. And not a seventeen-year-old girl with a tree-shaped scar on her knee—and a name. History is percentiles, the thoughts of great men, and the description of eras. Does the girl know that the reason that she died in the sea or in a twenty-foot slop pit on a ship named Jesus is because that was her era?

Shadrack began a struggle that was to last for twelve days, a struggle to order and focus experience. It had to do with making a place for fear as a way of controlling it.

What one puts up with in a friendship is determined by the emotional value of the relationship.

like a piece of soft coal, leaving only flakes of ash and a question

Tolstoy was wrong. Kings are not the slaves of history. History is the slave of kings.

If I did I didn't know it. What's it like, velvet?' 'Well, Lu, velvet is like the world was just born. Clean and new and so smooth.

Borders, the porous places, the vulnerable points where one's concept of home is seen as being menaced be foreigners. Much of the alarm hovering at the borders, the gates, is stoked, it seems to me, by (1) both the threat and the promise of globalism and (2) na uneasy relationship with our own foreignness, our own rapidly disintegrating sense of belonging.

Twenty-two years old, weak, hot, frightened, not daring to acknowledge the fact that he didn't even know who or what he was... with no past, no language, no tribe, no source, no address book, no comb, no pencil, no clock, no pocket handkerchief, no rug, no bed, no can opener, no faded postcard, no soap, no key, no tobacco pouch, no soiled underwear and nothing nothing nothing to do...

for in their secret awareness of Him, He was not the God of three faces they sang about. They knew quite well that He had four, and that the fourth explained Sula.

Writing for me is thinking, and it's also a way to position myself in the world, particularly when I don't like what's going on. It's extremely important to me. ... I knew I always was compelled to do it, but I didn't know how essential it was to me.

populated the hills above it, taking small consolation in the fact that every day

fingers into his socks, looking up the inside back of his coat. If happiness is anticipation with certainty, we were happy.

The matrix out of which these powerful decisions are born is sometimes called racism, sometimes classicism, sometimes sexism. Each is an accurate term surely, but each is also misleading. The source is a deplorable inability to project, to become the "other," to imagine her or him. It is an intellectual flaw, a shortening of the imagination, and reveals an ignorance of gothic proportions as well as a truly laughable lack of curiosity.

she would never know her beauty. She would see only what there was to see: the eyes of other people.

But the doctor had felt threatened as soon as he walked in the door. Yet not having to beat up the enemy to get what he wanted was somehow superior—sort of, well, smart.

To what do we pay greatest allegiance? Family, language group, culture, country, gender? Religion, race? And if none of these matter, are we urbane, cosmopolitan, or simply lonely? In other words, how do we decide where we belong? What convinces us that we do? Or put another way, what is the matter with foreignness?

I even think now that the land of the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year. This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live. We are wrong, of course, but it doesn't matter. It's too late. At least on the edge of my town, among the garbage and the sunflowers of my town, it's much, much, much too late.

White but European which was not as bad as white and American;

Of particular interest were those printed in the nineteenth century when my grandfather spent his few minutes at school.

Kendini ancak keÅŸiÅŸlerin anlayabileceÄŸi sanatlara kapt?rmam?? ve doÄŸaya kar??abilen baÅŸka bir varl??a dönüÅŸmemiÅŸ olsa yaln?zl?k onu ezip geçerdi. KuÅŸlarla ÅŸakala??yor, bitkilerle sohbet ediyor, sincaplarla konuÅŸuyor, ineÄŸe ÅŸark? söyleyip aÄŸz?n? yaÄŸmur suyuyla dolduruyordu.

Now no one can fault the conqueror for writing history the way he sees it, and certainly not for digesting human events and discovering their patterns according to his point of view. But we can fault him for not owning up to what his point of view is.