Quotes from Toni Morrison

There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks.

You have to understand that, Lord. You said, Suffer little children to come unto me, and harm them not. Did you forget? Did you forget about the children? Yes. You forgot. You let them go wanting, sit on road shoulders, crying next to their dead mothers. I've seen them charred, lame, halt. You forgot, Lord. You forgot how and when to be God.

Don't mistake the fathers' thanks, Fairy had warned her. Men scared of us, always will be. To them we're death's handmaiden standing as between them and the children their wives carry. During those times, Fairy said, the midwife is the interference, the one giving orders, on whose secret skill so much depended, and the dependency irritated them. Especially here in this place where they had come to multiply in peace.

It was an opportunity to intervene at the heart of the problem: to bring God and language to natives who were assumed to have neither; to alter their diets, their clothes, their minds; to help them despise everything that had once made their lives worthwhile and to offer them instead the privilege of knowing the one and only God and a chance, thereby, for redemption. (227)

What you reckon make him do a thing like that? Beats me. Just nasty. Well, they ought to take her out of school. Ought to. She carry some of the blame. Oh, come on. She ain't but twelve or so. Yeah. But you never know. How come she didn't fight him?

Their children were like distant but exposed wounds whose aches were no less intimate because separate from their flesh. They had looked at the world and back at their children, back at the world and back again at their children, and Sula knew that one clear young eye was all that kept the knife away from the throat's curve.

I refused to explain, or even acknowledge, the "problem" as anything other than an artistic one.

Hi, dumplin'. Where your socks?" Marie seldom called Pecola the same thing twice, but invariably her epithets were fond ones chosen from menus and dishes that were forever uppermost in her mind.

The best thing was to love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well maybe you'd have a little love left over for the next one.

So he had said always, so she would not have to be afraid of the change—the falling away of skin, the drip and slide of blood, and the exposure of bones underneath. He had said always to convince her, assure her, of permanency.

Beloved so agitated she behaved like a two-year-old.

The doctor raised the gun and pointed it at what in his fear ought to have been flaring nostrils, foaming lips, and the red-rimmed eyes of a savage. Instead he saw the quiet, even serene, face of a man not to be fooled with.