Quotes from Toni Morrison

Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.

Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

The concept of physical beauty as a virtue is one of the dumbest, most pernicious and destructive ideas of the Western world, and we should have nothing to do with it.

Passion is never enough neither is skill.

Sunk in the grass of an empty lot on a spring Saturday, I split the stems of milkweed and thought about ants and peach pits and death and where the world went when I closed my eyes.

It's gonna hurt, now, " said Amy. "anything dead coming back to life hurts.

I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me.

I don't think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It's perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man.

I merged those two words, black and feminist, because I was surrounded by black women who were very tough and and who always assumed they had to work and rear children and manage homes.

My father saw two black men lynched on his street in Cartersville, as a child. And I think seeing two black businessmen - not vagrants - hanging from trees as a child was traumatic for him.

Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.

What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?

More than fear of loving bears or birds bigger than cows, I fear pathless nights. How, I wonder, can I find you in the dark?

Birth, life, and death -- each took place on the hidden side of a leaf

Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.

The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.

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

It was becoming a habit-this concentration on things behind him. Almost as though there were no future to be had. *Milkman*

I like marriage. The idea.

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

She is a friend of 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.

Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face; you are me

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