Quotes from Toni Morrison

We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.

Hospitality is gold in this City; you have to be clever to figure out how to be welcoming and defensive at the same time. When to love something and when to quit. If you don't know how, you can end up out of control or controlled by some outside thing like that hard case last winter. Word was that underneath the good times and the easy money something evil ran the streets and nothing was safe—not even the dead

The men had gnawed through the daisy trees until, wild-eyed and yelling, they broke in two and hit the ground. In the huge silence that followed their fall, orchids spiraled down to join them.

she was usually idling by the river bank, or gathering berries in a field when a someone appeared, with gentle and penetrating eyes, who—with no exchange of words—understood;

One of the most malevolent characteristics of racist thought is that it never produces new knowledge.

Lay em down, Sethe. Sword and shield. Down. Down. Both of em down. Down by the riverside. Sword and shield. Don't study war no more,. Lay all that mess down.

Si hay un libro que te gustaría leer pero aún no se ha escrito, entonces debes escribirlo.

Booker's smile traveled from his lips to his eyes. The joy in his face was infantile.

The novel, I believe, allows, encourages ways to experience the public – in time, with affect, in a communal space, with other people (characters), and in language that insists on individual participation. It also tries to illuminate and recover the relationship between literature and public life.

This slide of people [refugees] has freighted the concept of citizenship and altered our perceptions of space - public and private. The strain has been marked by a plethora of hyphenated designations of national identity.

The loneliest woman in the world is a woman without a close woman friend.

One of the most malevolent characteristics of racist thought is that it never produces new knowledge. It seems able to merely reformulate and refigure itself in multiple but static assertions

I loved the geography part. Learning about that made me want to read.

It is not a wholly medieval problem. It is quite a contemporary one: feminine power when directed at other women has historically been wielded in what has been described as a "masculine" manner.

Thrown, in this way, into the binding conviction that only a miracle could relieve her, she would never know her beauty. She would only see what there was to see: the eyes of other people.

She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind." ? Toni Morrison, Beloved

I am aware of how whiteness matures and ascends the throne of universalism by maintaining its powers to describe and enforce its descriptions.

There is a difference between being put out and being put outdoors. If you are put out, you go somewhere else; if you are outdoors, there is no place to go.

In its pursuit corporations plop themselves down in every corner of the globe selling "democracy" as though it were a brand of toothpaste, the patent to which they alone control.

I was physically revolted by and secretly frightened of those round moronic eyes, the pancake face, and orangeworms hair.

If he wanted the chair you were in, he stood there, silent, looking at the sitter until you got the message and got up.

Nothing will undo the accident; nothing will immediately repair the jar, so what is the urgency of the beating? To teach a lesson or to enjoy it?

Oh, Jesus.' 'He's a Northerner too. Lived in Israel, but a Northerner in His heart. His bleeding heart. His cute little old bleeding red heart. Southerners think they own Him, but that's just because the first time they laid eyes on Him, He was strung up on a tree. They can relate to that, see. Both the stringer and the strung.

She had not lived by the sea all those years, listened to the wharfman's songs all that time, to spend her life in the soundless cave of Elihue's mind.