black
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You don’t have to love me but you damn well have to respect me.

Toni Morrison

Perhaps that’s what all human relationships boiled down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?
TONI MORRISON

Human Life Perhaps Relationship Save
A dream is just a nightmare with lipstick.
TONI MORRISON

Dreams Fashion Nightmare
The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.
TONI MORRISON

Ability Imagination Power Strange Writing
Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.
TONI MORRISON

Black Lives Matter Crime Live Racism Traget
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

Difference Hard Work Honesty Life Live Pay Writing
Literature, it seems to me, is wisdom.
TONI MORRISON

Literature One Liner Wisdom
Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.
TONI MORRISON

Beautiful Women
Racism will disappear when it’s no longer profitable, and no longer psychologically useful. And when that happens, it’ll be gone. But at the moment, people make a lot of money off of it, pro and con.
TONI MORRISON

Disappear Happen Money People Profit Psychology Racism
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

Children Need Parents Raise Thinking Village
I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.
TONI MORRISON

Book Excitement Want Writing
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

Amount Black Lives Matter Magic Men
What a woman. What a life.
TONI MORRISON

Life Woman
When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.
TONI MORRISON

Broken Heart Pain Sad Suffering
I always know the ending; that’s where I start.
TONI MORRISON

Believe Confidence Ending Inspirational Start
I’ve spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books.
TONI MORRISON

Book Dominant Life Spend Try White Writing
Love is never any better than the lover.
TONI MORRISON

Love Lover

You don’t have to love me but you damn well have to respect me.

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You don’t have to love me but you damn well have to respect me.

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Popular Authors

More Toni Morrison Quotes