Quotes from Toni Morrison

The scholarship that looks into the mind, imagination, and behavior of slaves is valuable. But equally valuable is a serious intellectual effort to see what racial ideology does to the mind, imagination, and behavior of maters.

He wanted her in that room with him giving him the balance he was losing, the ballast and counterweight to the stone of sorrow New York City had given him.

The thrill that came with each blow was wonderfully familiar. Unable to stop and unwilling to, Frank kept going even though the big man was unconscious. The women stopped clawing each other and pulled at Frank's collar.

It withheld the refreshment in a sleep slept on it. It imposed a furtiveness on the loving done on it. Like a sore tooth that is not content to throb in isolation, but must diffuse its own pain to other parts of the body—making breathing difficult, vision limited, nerves unsettled, so a hated piece of furniture produces a fretful malaise that asserts itself throughout the house and limits the delight of things not related to it.           The

Somehow, some way, the child assuaged the tiny yet eternal yearning for the home Lina once knew where everyone had anything and no one had everything.

Being a black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from. It doesn't limit my imagination; it expands it," Toni Morrison, who turns eighty-eight today

And all he could say was that he did not know. He was guilty, therefore, of innocence. Was there anything so loathsome as a willfully innocent man? Hardly. An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore unworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.

the wide untrammeled space that once thrilled her became vacancy. A commanding and oppressive absence. She learned the intricacy of loneliness: the horror of color, the roar of soundlessness and the menace of familiar objects lying still.

You born here? Naw. Down south. Jacksonville, Florida. Bad country, boy. Bad, bad country. You know they ain't even got an orphanage in Jacksonville where colored babies can go? They have to put 'em in jail. I tell people that talk about them sit ins I was raised in jail, and it don't scare me none.

Have you ever seen the way a cloud loves a mountain? from Song of Solomon

She loved nothing in the world except this woman's son, wanted him alive more than anybody, but hadn't the least bit of control over the predator that lived inside her. Totally taken over by her anaconda love, she had no self left, no fears, no wants, no intelligence that was her own.

Tolstoy was wrong. Kings are not the slaves of history. History is the slave of kings.