Quotes from Toni Morrison

We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength. And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved.

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. In this world of outrageous, shameless wealth squatting, hulking, preening before the dispossessed, the very idea of "plenty" as Utopian ought to make us tremble. Plenty should not be understood as a paradise-only state, but as normal, everyday, humane life.

Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly…

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

They bowed their heads and listened obediently to Misner's beautifully put words and the tippy-tap steps of women who were nowhere in sight.

Our uneasiness with our own feelings of foreignness, our own rapidly fraying sense of belonging. 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?

She's an original. Doesn't recognize crazy.

Each story has a monster in it who made them tough instead of brave, so they open their legs rather than their hearts where that folded child is tucked.

I wish I'd a knowed more people. I would of loved 'em all. If I'd a knowed more, I would a loved more.

clarity about who one is and what one's work is, is inextricably bound up with one's place in a tribe—or a family, or a nation, or a race, or a sex, or what have you. And the clarity is necessary for the evaluation of the self and it is necessary for any productive intercourse with any other tribe or culture.

but the music, which he hoped would coat his nerve ends, only splayed them.

The fathers may soar, they may triumph, they may leave, but the children know who they are; they remember, half in glory and half in accusation.

Medical and scientific resources are directed toward more life and fitter life and remind us that the desire is for earthbound eternity, rather than eternal afterlife. The implication being that this is all there is.

Well, don't let your mouth start nothing that your ass can't stand. When you gone to get married? You need to have some babies. It'll settle you." "I don't want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.

Easy, I thought. Everything is so easy for them. They think they own the world.

Two little girls who knew what nobody else in the world knew—how not to ask questions. How to believe what had to be believed. There was politeness in that reluctance and generosity as well. Is your mother sick too? No, she dances all night. Oh—and an understanding nod.

But that might be unfair. It is hard not to notice how much more attention is given to hell rather than heaven. Dante's Inferno beats out Paradisio every time. Milton's brilliantly rendered pre-paradise world, known as Chaos, is far more fully realized than his Paradise. The visionary language of the doomed reaches heights of linguistic ardor with which language of the blessed and saved cannot compete.

Other people went crazy, why couldn't she? Other people's brains stopped, turned around and went on to something new...

Maybe I am different now, Twyla. But you're not. You're the same little state kid who kicked a poor old black lady when she was down on the ground. You kicked a black lady and you have the nerve to call me a bigot.

fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life.

prestressed concrete and steel contained anger, folded it back on itself to become a craving for things rather than vengeance

She was not only good at housekeeping, she enjoyed it. After her parents left for work and the other children were at school or in mines, the house was quiet. The stillness and isolation both calmed and energized her. She could arrange and clean without interruption until two o'clock, when Chicken and Pie came home.

Other than outwitting evil, waging war against the unworthy, there seems to be nothing for the inhabitants of paradise to do.

It wasn't death, or dying, that frightened him but the unexpectedness of both.