Quotes by Toni Morrison

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.
– 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
If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.
– Toni Morrison
If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.
– Toni Morrison
She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.
– 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
There is really nothing more to say-except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.
– Toni Morrison
When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.
– Toni Morrison
Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.
– Toni Morrison
You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone.
– Toni Morrison
Women's rights is not only an abstraction, a cause it is also a personal affair. It is not only about us it is also about me and you. Just the two of us.
– Toni Morrison
There is nothing of any consequence in education, in the economy, in city planning, in social policy that does not concern black people.
– Toni Morrison
The body is ready to have babies. Nature wants it done then, when the body can handle it, not after 40, when the income can handle it.
– Toni Morrison
It's been mentioned or suggested that Paradise will not be well studied, because it's about this unimportant intellectual topic, which is religion.
– Toni Morrison
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.
– Toni Morrison
I like marriage. The idea.
– Toni Morrison
I don't think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they're black or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money. That's what we're upset about.
– Toni Morrison
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.
– Toni Morrison
Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich inherit it. I don't mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network.
– Toni Morrison
Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.
– Toni Morrison
Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.
– 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
As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.
– Toni Morrison