Toni Morrison Infosite

 

 

Toni Morrison Quotes

• A lot of black people believe that Jews in this country have become white. They behave like white people rather than Jewish people.

• All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

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

• 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.

• Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.

• Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.

• Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.

• Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.

• 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.

• Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.

• Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth.

• For a long time I was convinced that the conflict between Jewish people and black people in this country was a media event.

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

• I always looked upon the acts of racist exclusion, or insult, as pitiable, from the other person. I never absorbed that. I always thought that there was something deficient about such people.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can't teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort.

• 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 is a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, you must be the one to write it.

• 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.

• I'm always annoyed about why black people have to bear the brunt of everybody else's contempt. If we are not totally understanding and smiling, suddenly we're demons.

• I'm not entangled in shaping my work according to other people's views of how I should have done it.

• In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it's nothing else but color.

• In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.

 

Toni Morrison Career Highlight

Novels

1970 - The Bluest Eye
1974 - Sula
1977 - Song of Solomon
1981 - Tar Baby
1987 - Beloved
1992 - Jazz
1999 - Paradise
2003 - Love
2008 - A Mercy

Children's literature

2002 - The Big Box
2002 - The Book of Mean People

Short stories

1983 - Recitatif

Plays

1986 - Dreaming Emmett

Libretti

2005 - Margaret Garner

Non-fiction

1974 - The Black Book
1992 - Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
1997 - Birth of a Nation'hood
2004 - The Journey to School Integration
2008 - What Moves at the Margin

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