50 Best Toni Morrison Quotes On Love & Life 2023

Toni morrison quotes

“And I am all the things I have ever loved: scuppernong wine, cool baptisms in silent water, dream books and number playing.” – Toni Morrison

“Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.” – Toni Morrison

“All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.” – Toni Morrison

“Some things you forget. Other things you never do.” – Toni Morrison

You wanna fly, you got to give up the thing that weighs you down.

Make a difference about something other than yourselves.

Somebody has to take responsibility for being a leader.

There is really nothing more to say-except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.

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

I get angry about things, then go on and work.

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

I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can’t do anything anyway.

If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.

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

At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.

She is a friend of my mind. She gathered me, man. The pieces I am, she gathered them and gave them back to me in all the right order.

Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.

Toni morrison quotes on love

“It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.” – Toni Morrison

“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.” – Toni Morrison

“Anything dead coming back to life hurts.” – Toni Morrison

“Let me tell you something. A man ain’t a goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can’t chop down because they’re inside.” – Toni Morrison

“You are your best thing.” – Toni Morrison

“The function of freedom is to free someone else.” – Toni Morrison

“There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship’s, smooths and contains the rocker. It’s an inside kind–wrapped tight like skin.” – Toni Morrison

“I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.” – Toni Morrison

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” – Toni Morrison

“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.” – Toni Morrison

Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another – physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought.” – Toni Morrison

“Don’t ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it.” – Toni Morrison

“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” – Toni Morrison

If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.” – Toni Morrison

“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.” – Toni Morrison

“Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind.” – Toni Morrison

“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.” – Toni Morrison

“A writer’s life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.”― Toni Morrison

“No more running-from nothing. I will never run from another thing on this Earth. I took one journey and I paid for the ticket, but let me tell you something, Paul D. Garner: it cost too much!”― Toni Morrison

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

― Toni Morrison

Toni morrison quotes on writing

“Can’t nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”― Toni Morrison

“I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can’t teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort.”― Toni Morrison

“Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe.” – Toni Morrison

“I tell my students, ‘When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game. ‘” – Toni Morrison

“Anger…it’s a paralyzing emotion…you can’t get anything done. People sort of think it’s an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling — I don’t think it’s any of that — it’s helpless…” – Toni Morrison

“At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.” – Toni Morrison

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

“What you do to children matters. And they might never forget.”― Toni Morrison

“I’m not entangled in shaping my work according to other people’s views of how I should have done it.”― Toni Morrison

“I want to feel what I feel. What’s mine. Even if it’s not happiness, whatever that means. Because you’re all you’ve got.”― Toni Morrison

“I don’t think many people appreciate silence or realize that it is as close to music as you can get.”― Toni Morrison

“Correct what you can; learn from what you can’t.”― Toni Morrison

“We never shape the world . . . the world shapes us.”― Toni Morrison

“The human body is robust. It can gather strength when it’s in mortal danger.”― Toni Morrison

“I get angry about things, then go on and work.”― Toni Morrison

“If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”― Toni Morrison

“Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.”― Toni Morrison

“Hate does that. Burns off everything but itself, so whatever your grievance is, your face looks just like your enemy’s.”― Toni Morrison

“When fear rules, obedience is the only survival choice.”― Toni Morrison

“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.”― Toni Morrison

“A good man is a good thing, but there is nothing in the world better than a good woman. She can be your mother, your wife, your girlfriend, your sister, or somebody you work next to. Don’t matter. You find one, stay there. You see a scary one, make tracks.”― Toni Morrison

“Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.” – Toni Morrison

“You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.” – Toni Morrison

“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?” – Toni Morrison

“You can’t own a human being. You can’t lose what you don’t own.” – Toni Morrison

“Make up a story…For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light.” – Toni Morrison