Quotes from Toni Morrison

The one who had been sold by a man battled the one who had been bought by one.

Rage has limited uses and serious flaws. It cuts off reason and displaces constructive action with mindless theater. Besides, absorbing the lies, untruths, both transparent and nuanced, of governments, their hypocrisy so polished it does not even care if it is revealed, can lead to a wearied and raveled mind.

Loggers move on after they destroy a forest.

Baby Suggs laughed, clear as anything. "You mean I never told you nothing about Carolina? About your daddy? You don't remember nothing about how come I walk the way I do and about your mother's feet, not to speak of her back? I never told you all that? Is that why you can't walk down the steps? My Jesus my." But you said there was no defense. "There ain't." Then what do I do? "Know it, and go on out the yard. Go on.

Struggling through the work is extremely important—more important to me than publishing it.

Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel, that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights, or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination. A writer's life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.

When I learned how repulsive this disinterested violence was, that it was repulsive because it was disinterested, my shame floundered about for refuge. The best hiding place was love. Thus the conversion from pristine sadism to fabricated hatred, to fraudulent love. It was a small step to Shirley Temple. I learned much later to worship her, just as I learned to delight in cleanliness, knowing, even as I learned, that the change was adjustment without improvement.

am interested in the farewell between black and white strangers who have, or might have, shared something significant; or who represent the end of something larger than themselves, where the separation symbolizes loss or renewal, for example.

he left her like a skunk leaves a smell.

Like a sore tooth that is not content to throb in isolation, but must diffuse its own pain to other parts of the body—making breathing difficult, vision limited, nerves unsettled, so a hated piece of furniture produces a fretful malaise that asserts itself throughout the house and limits the delight of things not related to it.

War Against Error" is a phrase originated to describe the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century efforts on the part of institutional religions to correct those whose beliefs were different. In a time when and place where state religion is the norm, apostasy is literally treason. Our modern world has "inherited a fully fledged apparatus of persecution and an intellectual tradition that justified killing in the name of God.

The unending problem of growing old was not how he changed, but how things did.

Well, if the belly buttons are to grow like-lines to give the baby blood, and only girls have babies, how come boys have belly buttons?" Maureen hesitated. "I don't know," she admitted. "But boys have all sorts of things they don't need.

since goodness is not only better and good for you, but it is also more interesting, more complicated, more demanding, less predictable, more adventuresome than its opposite. Evil really is boring. Sensational, perhaps, but not interesting. A low-level activity that needs masses or singularity or screams or screeching headlines to even get attention for itself, while goodness needs nothing.

Speaking-eyes, he thought, accompanied by the music of her voice.

Plenty should not be regulated to a paradisiacal state, but to normal, everyday, humane life.

Do you want him? I want somebody, I told her. He's as good as anybody, she said.

She could not get his love. . .so she settled for his fear.

Enron, Halliburton, and WorldCom.

He must rest his weight on his elbows when they make love, ostensibly to avoid hurting her breasts but actually to keep her from having to touch or feel too much of him. While

Either I am to live in this world on my terms or I will die out of it.

The deceased was the tragic hero, the survivors the innocent victims; there was the omnipresence of the deity, strophe and antistrophe of the chorus of mourners led by the preacher. There was grief over the waste of life, the stunned wonder at the ways of God, and the restoration of order in nature at the graveyard.

No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines

Some folks want to live forever. Some don't. I believe they decide on it anyway. People die when they want to and if they want to.