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Toni Morrison Quotes about Children

All Toni Morrison Quotes Age Art Character Children quotes Choices College Community Country Desire Diversity Earth Evil Falling In Love Feelings Friendship Giving Giving Up Hate Hatred Heart Home House Hurt Imagination Inspirational Inspiring Language Leaving Life Literature Loneliness Love Lying Magic Meaning Of Life Memories Nature Pain Passion Past Racism Reading Reality Responsibility Running School Silence Singing Skins Sleep Struggle Students Today Violence Waiting War Winter Writing

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.

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.

Children, Eye, Light

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.

Children, Thinking, Two

Toni Morrison, Danille Kathleen Taylor-Guthrie (1994). “Conversations with Toni Morrison”, p.131, Univ. Press of Mississippi

Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you'd have a little love left over for the next one.

Children, Next, Littles

FaceBook post by Toni Morrison from Aug 23, 2014

Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth.

Children, People, Earth

Toni Morrison, Danille Kathleen Taylor-Guthrie (1994). “Conversations with Toni Morrison”, p.103, Univ. Press of Mississippi

True the Black woman did the housework, the drudgery; true, she reared the children, often alone, but she did all of that while occupying a place on the job market, a place her mate could not get or which his pride would not let him accept.And she had nothing to fall back on: not maleness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality she may very well have invented herself.

Jobs, Children, Fall

Toni Morrison, Carolyn C. Denard (2008). “What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction”, p.24, Univ. Press of Mississippi

Two parents can't raise a child any more than one. You need a whole community - everybody - to raise a child. And the little nuclear family is a paradigm that just doesn't work. It doesn't work for white people or for black people. Why are we hanging onto it, I don't know. It isolates people into little units - people need a larger unit.

Family, Children, Two

Toni Morrison, Danille Kathleen Taylor-Guthrie (1994). “Conversations with Toni Morrison”, p.260, Univ. Press of Mississippi

Grown don't mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What's that supposed to mean? In my heart it don't mean a thing.

Mothers Day, Mom, Children

"Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

The habit of getting up early, which I had formed when the children were young, now became my choice. I am not very bright or very witty or very inventive after the sun goes down.

Witty, Children, Writing

You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone.

Children, Two, Community

I know it's trash: just another story made up to scare wicked females and correct unruly children. But it's all I have. I know I need something else. Something better. Like a story that shows how brazen women can take a good man down. I can hum to that.

Children, Men, Good Man

Toni Morrison (2008). “Love”, p.10, Random House

Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signsall the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured

Girl, Children, Blue

Toni Morrison (2017). “Race: Vintage Minis”, p.28, Random House

My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren't my children.

Children, People, Delightful

And they beat. The women for having known them and no more, no more; the children for having been them but never again. They killed a boss so often and so completely they had to bring him back to life to pulp him one more time. Tasting hot mealcake among pine trees, they beat it away. Singing love songs to Mr. Death, they smashed his head. More than the rest, they killed the flirt whom folks called Life for leading them on.

Song, Children, Flirting

My father saw two black men lynched on his street in Cartersville, as a child. And I think seeing two black businessmen - not vagrants - hanging from trees as a child was traumatic for him.

Children, Father, Men

Source: www.npr.org

She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise. In her country children have bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead to iterate the voice of speechlessness, of disabled and disabling language, of language adults have abandoned altogether as a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance, or expressing love.

Love, Country, Children

Nobel Prize for Literature Lecture, delivered 7 December 1993

There, in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning. For loneliness assumed the absence of other people, and the solitude she found in that desperate terrain had never admitted the possibility of other people. She wept then. Tears for the deaths of the littlest things: the castaway shoes of children; broken stems of marsh grass battered and drowned by the sea; prom photographs of dead women she never knew; wedding rings in pawnshop windows; the tiny bodies of Cornish hens in a nest of rice.

Children, Loneliness, Sea

Toni Morrison (1987). “Sula”

Listening to the doves in Alfred, Georgia, and having neither the right nor the permission to enjoy it because in that place mist, doves, sunlight, copper dirt, moon-everything belonged to the men who had the guns. . . . So you protected yourself and loved small. . . . A woman, a child, a brother-a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. . . . To get to a place where you could love anything you chose-not to need permission for desire-well now, that was freedom

Brother, Children, Gun

The children - I call them children when they're under 18 - are hungry for that love. The drugs are just a sleep that you can't even wake up from, because you might remember what you did when you were there. There's no place for them - there should be a rehabilitation center on every corner, along with McDonald's and the banks. This is serious business. The waiting lists are incredible. I mean, it's terrible. It's really terrible.

Children, Mean, Sleep

"Toni Morrison on Love and Writing". Interview with Bill Moyers, billmoyers.com. March 11, 1990.

Occasionally, as children, we might figure out how to call somebody a name, and they would figure out how to call us. But it wasn't - it was so light. It was so fluffy. I didn't really have a strong awareness of segregation and the separation of races until I left Lorain, Ohio.

Strong, Children, Light

"'I Regret Everything': Toni Morrison Looks Back On Her Personal Life". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. April 20, 2015.

I merged those two words, black and feminist, because I was surrounded by black women who were very tough and and who always assumed they had to work and rear children and manage homes.

Children, Home, Two

It's always seemed to me that black people's grace has been with what they do with language. In Lorrain, Ohio, when I was a child, I went to school with and heard the stories of Mexicans, Italians, and Greeks, and I listened. I remember their language, and a lot of it is marvelous. But when I think of things my mother or father or aunts used to say, it seems the most absolutely striking thing in the world.

Mother, Children, Father

My first-born. All I can remember of her is how she loved the burned bottom of bread. Can you beat that? Eight children and that's all I remember.

Children, Eight, Bread

"Beloved". Book by Toni Morrison, 1987.

When you think of sexual liberation, which women wanted to have or not have children, which is the choice, not a command, and other kinds of things they wanted in their relationships with their husbands, or partners or what have you, became for subsequent generations some license that they themselves feel, that is absolutely demeaning and mean younger and younger and younger.

Children, Husband, Mean

Source: wordmag.com

But maybe a man was nothing but a man, which is what Baby Suggs always said. They encouraged you to put some of your weight in their hands and soon as you felt how light and lovely that was, they studied your scars and tribulations, after which they did what he had done: ran her children out and tore up the house. [...] A man ain't nothing but a man,' said Baby Suggs. 'But a son? Well now, that's somebody.

Love, Baby, Children

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