Toni Morrison

Novelist, Essayist

Toni Morrison was a celebrated American novelist known for her powerful exploration of race, identity, and love, particularly in her acclaimed work 'Beloved'.

Born
February 18, 1931
Died
August 5, 2019
Quotes
430
Rank
#76

Quote collection

Toni Morrison quotes (page 20 of 22)

430 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.

Toni Morrison Novelist, Essayist
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"But Jude,' she would say, 'you knew me. All those days and years, Jude, you knew me. My ways and my hands and how my stomach folded and how we tried to get Mickey to nurse and how about that time when the landlord said...but you said...and I cried, Jude. You knew me and had listened to the things I said in the night, and heard me in the bathroom and laughed at my raggedy girdle and I laughed too because I knew you too, Jude. So how could you leave me when you knew me?"

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"You been gone too long, Sula. Not too long, but maybe too far."

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"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."

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"if they put an iron circle around your neck I will bite it away"

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"A son ain't what a woman say. A son is what a man do."

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"When I'm not creating or focusing on something I can imagine or invent, I think I go back over my life - I don't recommend this by the way - and you pick up, oh, what'd you do that for? Why didn't you understand this?"

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"Make a difference, does it? You stay the night here snake get you."

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"It would be ten years before they saw each other again, and their meeting would be thick with birds."

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"It hit her like a sledgehammer, and it was then that she knew what to feel. A liquid trail of hate flooded her chest. Knowing that she would hate him long and well filled her with pleasant anticipation, like when you know you are going to fall in love with someone and you wait for the happy signs. Hating BoyBoy, she could get on with it, and have the safety, the thrill, the consistency of that hatred as long as she wanted or needed it to define and strengthen her or protect her from routine vulnerabilities."

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"We read about how Ajax and Achilles will die for each other, but very little about the friendship of women."

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"I'm losing the definition now of politics. I sort of don't know what that is anymore. People say politically correct, I don't know what that means. I know what they think they mean."

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"Now what? All the battles feminists won about not being a sex object, not being evaluated based on these things, that now other generations are wallowing in, the extremes they go to, to look sexually attractive? It's stunning how things that one fought desperately for are just being tossed aside with aplomb."

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"When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world?"

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"I'm just trying to look at something without blinking, to see what it is like, or it could have been like, and how that had something to do with the way we live now. Novels are always inquiries for me."

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"Beginning 'Beloved' with numerals rather than spelled out numbers, it was my intention to give the house an identity separate from the street or even the city."

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"Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul."

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"When they fall in love with a city, it is for forever and it is like forever."

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