When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.
—Toni Morrison
Topics: Pain
Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.
—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
Topics: Friendship
Of course I’m a black writer. I’m not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren’t marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call “literature” is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.
—Toni Morrison
Topics: Authors & Writing, Grief
For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction.
—Toni Morrison
How soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like forever. As though there never was a time when they didn’t love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves.
—Toni Morrison
Topics: Cities, City Life, Country
Grown don’t mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What’s that suppose to mean? In my heart it don’t mean a thing.
—Toni Morrison
Topics: Mothers
Birth, life, and death—each took place on the hidden side of a leaf.
—Toni Morrison
Topics: Life
If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.
—Toni Morrison
All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.
—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
Topics: Reason
If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.
—Toni Morrison
Topics: Books, Writing, Book
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Joyce Carol Oates American Novelist
- Pearl S. Buck American Novelist
- William Dean Howells American Writer, Critic
- Charles W. Chesnutt American Novelist
- Philip Roth American Novelist, Short-story Writer
- Langston Hughes American Poet, Writer
- Saul Bellow Canadian-born American Novelist
- William Faulkner American Novelist
- Thomas Bailey Aldrich American Writer
- Erica Jong American Novelist, Poet
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