Quotes from Toni Morrison

The eyes are petulant, mischievous. To Pecola they are simply pretty. She eats the candy, and its sweetness is good. To eat the candy is somehow to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane.

Mavi sularda göremediÄŸim yüzümü bulup bana vermenin sebebi onu bir darbede paramparça etmek miydi?

The disc jockey announced the tunes as though they were made by his family or best friends: King Solomon, Brother Otis, Dinah baby, Ike and Tina girl, Sister Dakota, the Temps.

Perhaps that's what all human relationships boiled down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?

They did everything but slap each other, and finally they did that. What postponed the inevitable were loves forlorn and a very young girl in too tight clothes tapping on the screen door.

There's a line between revision and fretting, just working it to death." —Toni Morrison

Wasn't there a tribe in Africa that lashed the dead body to the back of the one who had murdered it? That would certainly be justice—to carry the rotting corpse around as a physical burden as well as public shame and damnation.

Homelessness and crime have been recharacterized and redeployed so that "public space" is increasingly seen as a protected preserve open only to the law-abiding and the

Sethe,' he says, 'me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.

She parked, and the Cadillac, dark as bruised blood, stayed there for two years.

Just Imagine. No illness. Ever. No pain. No aging or frailty of any kind. No loss or grief or tears. And obviously no more dying, not even if the stars shattered into motes and the moon disintegrated like a corpse beneath the sea.

Amanuensis. That was the word she chose, and since it was straight out of the nineteenth century, her mother approved, relishing the blank stares she received when she told her lady guests what position her daughter had acquired with the State Poet Laureate.

In order to describe and explore these questions I needed 1) to examine the definition of paradise, 2) to delve into the power of colorism, 3) to dramatize the conflict between patriarchy and matriarchy, and 4) disrupt racial discourse altogether by signaling then erasing it.

Knowing that she would hate him long and well filled her with pleasant anticipation, like when you know you are going to fall in love with someone and you wait for the happy signs.

Racism will disappear when it's no longer profitable, and no longer psychologically useful. And when that happens, it'll be gone. But at the moment, people make a lot of money off of it, pro and con.

the girl's face was as tight and mean as broccoli

Well, now. That's something you will have - a broken heart. Railroad Tommy's eyes softened, but the merriment in them died suddenly. And folly. A whole lot of folly. You can count on it.

You rely on a sentence to say more than the denotation and the connotation; you revel in the smoke that the words send up.

At first the people in the town were frightened; they knew Shadrack was crazy but that did not mean that he didn't have any sense or, even more important, that he had no power. [...] Once the people understood the boundaries and nature of his madness, they could fit him, so to speak, into the scheme of things.

Looking at Milkman in those nighttime talks, they yearned for something. Some word from him that would rekindle the dream and stop the death they were dying.

She had been husbanding her own misery, shaping it, making of it an art and a Way.

Salt-sweet. Like not quite ripe strawberries covered with the light salt sweat of running days and hopping, skipping, jumping hours.

Milton's Paradise is quite available these days, if not in fact certainly as ordinary, unexceptionable desire.

Plenty in a world of excess and attending greed, which tilts resources to the rich and forces others to envy, is an almost obscene feature of a contemporary paradise.