Quotes from Toni Morrison

I'll take hate any day. But don't give me love. I can't take no more love, Lord. I can't carry it.

A woman could be cobra-thin and starving, but if she had grapefruit boobs and raccoon eyes, she was deliriously happy.

Six months into the bliss of edible sex, free-style music, challenging books and the company of an easy undemanding Bride, the fairy-tale castle collapsed into the mud and sand on which its vanity was built. And Booker ran away.

I just have the hunger for a permanent place.

Unaligned, nobly interventionist, unbrooked by nations and political parties, private interests or public exhaustion, Amnesty International declares states, walls, borders irrelevant to its humanitarian goals, detrimental to its tasks, by summoning responsibility and refusing to accept a myopic government's own narrative of its behavior.

The impulse to do and revere art is an ancient need - whether on cave walls, on ones own body, a cathedral or religious rite, we hunger for a way to articulate who we are and what we mean.

the security of every other nation in the world be subordinate to the comfort of the United States

One by fire, one by water, two of what he had so intensely loved gone, he thought. He couldn't lose a third.

Love is or ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.

You don't have any weaknesses?' 'I haven't found any.

If you do not feed the hungry, they will eat you, and the manner of their eating is as varied as it is FIERCE.

It took some time to figure out the motives for faking love—hers and theirs. Survival, she supposed, literal and emotional.

I don't foresee, or want, a color-blind, race-neutral environment. The nineteenth century was the time for that. It's too late, now. Our race-inflected culture not only exists, it thrives. The question is whether it thrives as a virus or a bountiful harvest of possibilities.

We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous.

I did not know why I destroyed those dolls. But I did know that nobody ever asked me what I wanted for Christmas

Ajax blinked. Then he looked swiftly into her face. In her words, in her voice, was a sound he knew well. For the first time he saw the green ribbon. He looked around and saw the gleaming kitchen and the table set for two and detected the scent of the nest. Every hackle on his body rose, and he knew that very soon she would, like all of her sisters before her, put him to the death-knell question Where you been? His eyes dimmed with a mild and momentary regret.

All this she saw in their eyes, and the sight filled her own with water warmer and much older than the rain.

When I got outside, I felt pains in my crotch, I had held my legs together so tight trying to make that woman understand. But I reckon now she couldn't understand. She married a man with a slash in his face instead of a mouth. So how could she understand?

Like Twyla, Morrison wants us ashamed of how we treat the powerless, even if we, too, feel powerless. And one of the ethical complexities of "Recitatif" is the uncomfortable fact that even as Twyla and Roberta fight to assert their own identities—the fact they are both "somebody"—they simultaneously cast others into the role of nobodies.

I don't miss you anymore adam rather i miss the emotion that your dying produced a feeling so strong it defined me while it erased you leaving only your absence for me to live in like the silence of the japanese gong that is more thrilling than whatever sound may follow.

As long as your feet are under my table, you'll do in this house what you are told.

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. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity;

It hurt him, he would say, deeply hurt him, after all these years, but if you loved somebody as he did her, you had to think of them first. You couldn't be selfish with somebody you loved.

They seemed to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds—cooled—and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path. They danced a macabre ballet around the victim, whom, for their own sake, they were prepared to sacrifice to the flaming pit. Black