Quotes from Toni Morrison

Knowing his label provided him with both comfort and courage, he believed that to name an evil was to neutralize if not annihilate it.

Some of them had to have Bible verses read to them because they could not decipher print themselves, so they had sharpened the skills of the illiterate: perfect memory, photographic minds, keen senses of smell and hearing.

Once they knew she had been working for a doctor, the eye rolling and tooth sucking was enough to make clear their scorn. And nothing Cee remembered—how pleasant she felt upon awakening after Dr. Beau had stuck her with a needle to put her to sleep; how passionate he was about the value of the examinations; how she believed the blood and pain that followed was a menstrual problem—nothing made them change their minds about the medical industry.

Gimme hate, Lord, he whimpered. 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. It's too heavy. Jesus, you know. You know all about it. Ain't it heavy? Jesus? Ain't love heavy? Don't you see, Lord? Your own son couldn't carry it. If it killed Him, what You think it's gonna do to me? Huh? Huh?

He habitually contrasted the beaten, penniless, half-naked King of the Jews screaming betrayal on a cross with the bejeweled, glamorously dressed pope whispering homilies above the Vatican's vault.

They would discuss the slapping but not the pregnancy and certainly not the girl with sapphires hidden in her shoes.

A 1968 calendar, large X's marking various dates (April 4, July 19); a letter written in blood so smeary its satanic message cannot be deciphered; an astrology chart; a fedora tilted on the plastic neck of a female torso, and, in a place that once housed Christians—well, Catholics anyway—not a cross of Jesus anywhere.

I'm Heed Cosey. And you are?" "Junior. But you can call me June." "Oh, dear," said Heed, and batted her lashes as if someone had spilled red wine on pale velvet: sorry, of course, and no fault, of course, but difficult to clean nonetheless.

Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can't nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.

There is really nothing more to say—except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.

What are you? Some kinda mermaid?" one man had shouted, and reached hurriedly for his socks.

Writers—journalists, essayists, bloggers, poets, playwrights—can disturb the social oppression that functions like a coma on the population, a coma despots call peace; and they stanch the blood flow of war that hawks and profiteers thrill to.

When I teach creative writing, I always speak about how you have to learn how to read your work." —Toni Morrison

The only way to own what I know is to write it and let you read what I write

Jumping from the roof of Mercy was the most interesting thing he had done.

Youth being the excuse for that fortune-cookie love—until it wasn't, until it became pure adult stupidity.

The irrelevance cum sensationalism of mainstream media, its strange quietude on vital issues, its publicity posing as journalism did their job and mangled my own hapless, helpless unspeakable thoughts.

Yet here, not twenty miles away from a quiet, orderly community, there were women like none he knew or ever heard tell of.

You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction.

The words dance in my head to the music in my mouth.

As in the case of many misanthropes, his disdain for people led him into a profession designed to serve them. He was engaged in a line of work that was dependent solely on his ability to win the trust of others, and one in which the most intimate relationships were necessary.

They did not believe death was accidental-life might be, but death was deliberate. They did not believe Nature was ever askew-only inconvenient...The purpose of evil was to survive it...

There is no toilet paper.

The decision he would make would be extremely important but the way he made the decision would be careless, haphazard, and uniformed.