Quotes by Toni Morrison

About Toni Morrison:

Toni Morrison is an American novelist, editor, and professor. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed characters. Among her best known novels are The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon and Beloved. She was also commissioned to write the libretto for a new opera, Margaret Garner, first performed in 2005. She won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award in 1988 for Beloved and the Nobel Prize in 1993. On May 29, 2012, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Morrison serves as Professor Emeritus at Princeton University.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

We will be judged by how well we love.

Toni Morrison

I sold my elegant blackness to all those childhood ghosts and now they pay me for it.

Toni Morrison

She was a tall woman with unfashionable hips and a long chestnut braid singing down her back.

Toni Morrison

When fear rules, obedience is the only survival choice.

Toni Morrison

Every Saturday morning, first thing before breakfast, his parents held conferences with their children requiring them to answer two questions put to each of them: 1. What have you learned that is true (and how do you know)? 2. What problem do you hav...

Toni Morrison

If I hadn't trained Lula Ann properly she wouldn't have known to always cross the street and avoid white boys.

Toni Morrison

Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.

Toni Morrison

Here was an ugly little girl asking for beauty....A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes. His outrage grew and felt like power. For the first time he honestly wished he could work mi...

Toni Morrison

She was never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty, and the scale was one she absorbed in full from the silver screen.

Toni Morrison

She missed -- without knowing what she missed-- paints and crayons

Toni Morrison

But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.

Toni Morrison

Never did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed him ... His subconscious knew what his min did not guess-that hating them would have consumed him, burned him up like a piece of soft coal, leavi...

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. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.

Toni Morrison

Lonely was much better than alone.

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 a free man is never safe.

Toni Morrison

Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live

Toni Morrison

I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer – its dust and lowering skies.

Toni Morrison

guileless and without vanity,we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our own skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness.

Toni Morrison

Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

Toni Morrison

The best thing she was, was her children.

Toni Morrison

God take what He would," she said. And He did, and He did, and He did and then gave her Halle who gave her freedom when it didn't mean a thing.

Toni Morrison

Author Bio

  • NameToni Morrison
  • DescriptionAmerican writer
  • BornFebruary 18, 1931
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist; Librettist
  • AwardsNobel Prize In Literature; Knight Of The Legion Of Honour; Commandeur Des Arts Et Des Lettres?; Norman Mailer Prize; National Humanities Medal; The Nichols-Chancellor's Medal