Toni Morrison Quotes - Page 3

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

From my point of view, which is that of a storyteller, I see your life as something artful, waiting, just waiting and ready for you to make it art.

I don't know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.

Something that is loved is never lost.

When a man angers you, he conquers you.

You free. Nothing and nobody is obliged to save you but you.

We never shape the world . . . the world shapes us.

What I'm doing ain't about hating White people. It's about loving us.

I always know the ending; that's where I start.

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

As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.

What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.

You can't own a human being. You can't lose what you don't own. Suppose you did own him. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that? Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door? You don't, do you? And neither does he. You're turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can't value you more than you value yourself.

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

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

I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.

Let your face speak what's in your heart. When my kids walk in the room my face says I'm glad to see them.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

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.

Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.

Can't nothing heal without pain, you know.

In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can't take positions that are closed. Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book -- leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity.

The enemy is not men. The enemy is the concept of patriarchy, the concept of patriarchy as the way to run the world or do things.

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

There is no civilization that did not begin with art, Whether it was drawing a line in the sand, painting a cave or dancing.