Quotes By Toni Morrison

Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth.

I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can't teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort.

You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone.

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.

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.

I always looked upon the acts of racist exclusion, or insult, as pitiable, from the other person. I never absorbed that. I always thought that there was something deficient about such people.

I get angry about things, then go on and work.

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

In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it's nothing else but color.

If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, you must be the one to write it.

You marvel at the economy and this choice of words. How many ways can you describe the sky and the moon? After Sylvia Plath, what can you say?

In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.

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

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'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.

One of my kids was born in 1968. There were going to be political difficulties, but they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to.

Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.

My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren't my children.

I merged those two words, black and feminist, because I was surrounded by black women who were very tough and and who always assumed they had to work and rear children and manage homes.

The body is ready to have babies. Nature wants it done then, when the body can handle it, not after 40, when the income can handle it.

I'm not entangled in shaping my work according to other people's views of how I should have done it.