Toni Morrison Quotes - Page 2

When a child walks in the room, your child or anybody else’s child, do your eyes light up? That’s what they’re looking for.

I am a writer and my faith in the world of art is intense, but not irrational, nor naïve - because art takes us and makes us take a journey beyond price, beyond cost, into bearing witness to the world as it is and as it should be. Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

Please don't settle for happiness. It's not good enough. Of course you deserve it, but if that's all you have in mind - happiness - I want to suggest to you that personal success devoid of meaningfulness, free of a steady commitment to social justice - that's more than a barren life. It's a trivial one.

If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And white people have a very, very serious problem.

I dream a dream that dreams back at me.

In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent.

Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It's not having no responsibilitie s; it's choosing the ones you want.

Let your face speak what's in your heart.

If you take racism away from certain people - I mean, vitriolic racism as well as the sort of social racist - if you take that away, they may have to face something really terrible, misery, self-misery, and deep pain about who they are.

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

Liberation means you don't have to be silenced.

Love is never any better than the lover.

Anger ... it's a paralyzing emotion ... you can't get anything done. People sort of think it's an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling — I don't think it's any of that — it's helpless ... it's absence of control — and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers ... and anger doesn't provide any of that — I have no use for it whatsoever." [Interview with CBS radio host Don Swaim, September 15, 1987.]

What's the world for you if you can't make it up the way you want it?

Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.

If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.

In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.

My theory is that the world is a difficult place to live in and distraction is the name of the game.

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

Sometimes what I write on the page frightens me, so I feel free when I write, but I don't feel safe.

The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.

All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.

There is an incredible amount of magic and feistiness in black men that nobody has been able to wipe out. But everybody has tried.

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.

At some point in life, the world's beauty becomes enough.