From my point of view, your life is already a miracle of chance waiting for you to shape its destiny.
TONI MORRISONThe pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.
More Toni Morrison Quotes
-
-
What’s the world for you if you can’t make it up the way you want it?
TONI MORRISON -
And I am all the things I have ever loved: scuppernong wine, cool baptisms in silent water, dream books and number playing.
TONI MORRISON -
I don’t think one parent can raise a child. I don’t think two parents can raise a child. You really need the whole village.
TONI MORRISON -
Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.
TONI MORRISON -
There is an incredible amount of magic and feistiness in black men that nobody has been able to wipe out. But everybody has tried.
TONI MORRISON -
If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.
TONI MORRISON -
Today is always here,’ said Sethe. ‘Tomorrow, never.
TONI MORRISON -
Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.
TONI MORRISON -
To get to a place where you could love anything you chose – not to need permission for desire – well now that was freedom.
TONI MORRISON -
Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.
TONI MORRISON -
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
TONI MORRISON -
All important things are hard.
TONI MORRISON -
If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.
TONI MORRISON -
He can’t value you more than you value yourself.
TONI MORRISON -
If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.
TONI MORRISON -
You don’t have to love me but you damn well have to respect me.
TONI MORRISON -
All art is knowing when to stop.
TONI MORRISON -
There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.
TONI MORRISON -
Literature, it seems to me, is wisdom.
TONI MORRISON -
In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.
TONI MORRISON -
When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.
TONI MORRISON -
Black women have always been friends. I mean, if you didn’t have each other you had nothing.
TONI MORRISON -
You free. Nothing and nobody is obliged to save you but you.
TONI MORRISON -
There’s a difference between writing for a living and writing for life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises. If you write for life, you’ll work hard; you’ll do what’s honest, not what pays.
TONI MORRISON -
But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.
TONI MORRISON -
The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one.
TONI MORRISON