Quotes from Toni Morrison

Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs—all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured.

Nowadays silence is looked on as odd and most of my race has forgotten the beauty of meaning much by saying little. Now tongues work all by themselves with no help from the mind.

And how sweet that would have been: the two of them back by the milk shed, squatting by the churn, smashing cold, lumpy butter into their faces with not a care in the world.

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

It was as though he no longer needed to drink to forget whatever it was he could not remember. Now he could not remember that he had ever forgotten anything. Perhaps that was why for the first time after that old day in France he was beginning to miss the presence of other people. Shadrack had improved enough to feel lonely. If he was lonely before, he didn't know because the noise he kept up, the roaring, the busyness protected him from knowing it.

Sometimes. Sometimes it's a ambulance. Today it's a hearse.

Girls can do that. Steer a man away from death or drive him to it.

Listen to me. You are about to find out what it takes, how the world is, how it works and how it changes when you are a parent.

Sweetheart. That's what the weather was called. Sweetheart weather, the prettiest day of the year.

You don't know what heat is until you cross the border from Texas to Louisiana in the summer. You can't come up with words that catch it. Trees give up. Turtles cook in their shells. Describe that if you know how.

How'd you get rid of her?' 'Killed her. Then I killed the me that killed her.' 'Who's left?' 'Me.

whether imbued with or struggling against conventional Western views of benighted Africa, their protagonists found the continent to be as empty as that collection plate—a vessel waiting for whatever copper and silver imagination was pleased to place there.