Quotes from Toni Morrison

The only way to own what I know is to write it and let you read it

I must confess, though, that I sometimes lose interest in the characters and get much more interested in the trees and animals. I think I exercise tremendous restraint in this, but my editor says, 'Would you stop this beauty business.' And I say, 'Wait, wait until I tell you about these ants.

I can say that my narrative project is as difficult today as it was then.

Exactly the way old folks said: not when you call Him; not when you want Him; only when you need Him and right on time.

He dragged her under him and made love to her with the steadiness and the intensity of a man about to leave for Dayton.

Clearing damp and gasping for breath. In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart. She did not tell them to clean up their lives or go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glory bound pure. She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it.

But there is nothing to beat what the City can make of a nightsky. It can empty itself of surface, and more like the ocean than the ocean itself, go deep, starless. … It can go purple and keep an orange heart so the clothes of the people on the streets glow like dance-hall costumes.

If there's a book you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

Adam first, Eve next, and also, confused about her role, the first outlaw?

Criticism as a form of knowledge is capable of robbing literature not only of its own implicit and explicit ideology but of its ideas as well; it can dismiss the difficult, arduous work writers do to make an art that becomes and remains part of and significant within a human landscape.

They were troublesome thoughts, but they wouldn't go away. Under the moon, on the ground, alone, with not even the sound of baying dogs to remind him that he was with other people, his self--the cocoon that was personality--gave way. He could barely see his own hand, and couldn't see his feet. He was only his breath, coming slower now, and his thoughts. The rest of him disappeared. So the thoughts came, unobstructed by other people, by things, even by the sight of himself.

Unlike the English fogs he had known since he would walk, or those way north where he lived now, this one was sun fired, turning the world into thick, hot gold. Penetrating it was like struggling through a dream.