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Toni Morrison Quotes
1931–2019 United States
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019), known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist, essayist, book editor, and college professor, who received a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
United States Academics Authors Editors Educators Also known as: Morrison, Toni
Random Toni Morrison quote
77 quotes
He knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you choose — not to need permission for desire — well now, that was freedom.
Beloved (1987)
They stayed that way for a while because neither Denver nor Sethe knew how not to: how to stop and not love the look or feel of the lips that kept on kissing.
Beloved (1987)
What's fair ain't necessarily true.
Beloved (1987)
This is not a story to pass on.
Beloved (1987)
They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time. No need to hurry out here. They are seventeen miles from a town which has ninety miles between it and any other. Hiding places will be plentiful in the Convent, but there is time and the day has just begun.
Paradise (1998)
She smiled then, at the memory of it. The smile broke in two and became a sudden suck of air, but she did not shudder of close her eyes. She wheeled.
Beloved (1987)
It was a fine cry — loud and long — but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.
Sula (1973)
white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President
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.
Beloved (1987)
"You got two feet, Sethe, not four..."
Beloved (1987)
It’s important, therefore, to know who the real enemy is, and to know the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being.
A Humanist View (1975)
People keep saying, ‘We need to have a conversation about race’. This is the conversation. I want to see a cop shoot a white unarmed teenager in the back. And I want to see a white man convicted for raping a black woman. Then when you ask me, ‘Is it over?’, I will say yes.
The couple upstairs, united, didn't hear a sound, but below them, outside, all around 124 the snow went on and on and on. Piling itself, burying itself. Higher. Deeper.
Beloved (1987)
They were not holding hands, but their shadows were. Sethe looked to her left and all three of them were gliding over the dust holding hands. Maybe he was right. A life.
Beloved (1987)
However moribund, it is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences.
Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)
I believe that one of the principal ways in which we acquire, hold, and digest information, is via narrative — so I hope you will understand when the remarks I make begin with the first sentence of our childhood — that we all remember — the phrase: "Once upon a time."
Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)
Was there anything so loathsome as a wilfully innocent man? Hardly. An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.
Tar Baby (1981)
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