Quotes By Toni Morrison

No one ever talks about the moment you found that you were white. Or the moment you found out you were black. That's a profound revelation. The minute you find that out, something happens. You have to renegotiate everything.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway.

I don't think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It's perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man.

Somebody has to take responsibility for being a leader.

Schools must stop being holding pens to keep energetic young people off the job market and off the streets. We stretch puberty out a long, long time.

The unflattering reviews are painful for short periods of time; the badly written ones are deeply, deeply insulting. That reviewer took no time to really read the book.

There is really nothing more to say-except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.

Women's rights is not only an abstraction, a cause; it is also a personal affair. It is not only about us; it is also about me and you. Just the two of us.

Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.

Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich inherit it. I don't mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network.

Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers.

It's been mentioned or suggested that Paradise will not be well studied, because it's about this unimportant intellectual topic, which is religion.

A lot of black people believe that Jews in this country have become white. They behave like white people rather than Jewish people.

Nelson Mandela is, for me, the single statesman in the world. The single statesman, in that literal sense, who is not solving all his problems with guns. It's truly unbelievable.

She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.

If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.

If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.

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