Quotes from Toni Morrison

All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in. [Conversation with Elizabeth Farnsworth, PBS NewsHour , March 9, 1998]

if they put an iron circle around your neck I will bite it away

What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.

But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.

You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question.

The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.

I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.

I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer — its dust and lowering skies.

Every now and then she looked around for tangible evidence of his having ever been there. Where were the butterflies? the blueberries? the whistling reed? She could find nothing, for he had left nothing but his stunning absence.

You don't have to love me but you damn well have to respect me.

No matter how hard we try to ignore it, the mind always knows truth and wants clarity.

I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me.