Toni Morrison Quotes - Page 6

How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.

Gimme hate, Lord,” he whimpered. “I’ll take hate any day. But don’t give me love. I can’t take no more love, Lord. I can’t carry it...It’s too heavy. Jesus, you know, you know all about it. Ain’t it heavy? Jesus? Ain’t love heavy?

Which was what love was: unmotivated respect.

Write about something you don't know. And don't be scared, ever.

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.

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

There's a contract that I make between myself, the author, and the reader. I have to figure out how to give the reader certain powers of recognition, or his own knowledge, his own feelings, but I provide them, so we're working together.

Race is the least reliable information you can have about someone. It's real information, but it tells you next to nothing.

I'm a writer in the world. I translate the confusion that I might feel, the dread that I know I feel, moving towards some other place, moving away from puny language, from all that dread into some other kind of language.

New York is the last true city.

And talking about dark! You think dark is just one color, but it ain't. There're five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some woolly. Some just empty. Some like fingers. And it don't stay still, it moves and changes from one kind of black to another. Saying something is pitch black is like saying something is green. What kind of green? Green like my bottles? Green like a grasshopper? Green like a cucumber, lettuce, or green like the sky is just before it breaks loose to storm? Well, night black is the same way. May as well be a rainbow.

Being able to laugh got me through.

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.

I write the way women have babies. You don't know it's going to be like that. If you did, there's no way you would go through with it.

It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love ... You can't own a human being.

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

For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction.

I laughed but before I could agree with the hairdressers that she was crazy, she said, 'What's the world for if you can't make it up the way you want it?' " 'The way I want it?' " 'Yeah. The way you want it. Don't you want it to be something more than what it is?' " 'What'st eh point? I can't change it.' " 'That's the point. If you don't, it will change you and it'll be your fault cause you let it. I let it. And messed up my life.' " 'Mess it up how?' " 'Forgot it.' " 'Forgot?' " 'Forgot it was mine. My life. I just ran up and down the streets wishing I was somebody else.

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.

You need intelligence, and you need to look. You need a gaze, a wide gaze, penetrating and roving - thats what's useful for art.

I always start out with an idea, even a boring idea, that becomes a question I don't have answers to.

Unpersecuted, unjailed, unharrassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world's resources.

Love it, love it and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.

Definitions belong to the definer, not the defined.