What solicited my attention was whether the cultural associations of jazz were as important to Cardinal’s “possession” as were its intellectual foundations. I was interested, as I had been... in the way black people ignite critical moments of discovery or change or emphasis in literature not written by them. In fact I had started, casually like a game, keeping a file of such instances.

— Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison Quotes

His first earned purchase made him glow, never mind the turnips were withered dry. That was when he decided that to eat, walk and sleep anywhere was life as good as it got.

— Toni Morrison

I insist on being shocked. I am never going to become immune. I think that’s a kind of failure to see so much of it that you die inside. I want to be surprised and shocked every time.

— Toni Morrison

Don’t mistake the fathers’ thanks,” Fairy had warned her. “Men scared of us, always will be. To them we’re death’s handmaiden standing as between them and the children their wives carry.” During those times, Fairy said, the midwife is the interference, the one giving orders, on whose secret skill so much depended, and the dependency irritated them. Especially here in this place where they had come to multiply in peace.

— Toni Morrison

In 1983 I lost my job – or left it. One, the other, or both. In any case, I had been part-time for a while, coming into the publishing house one day a week to do the correspondence-telephoning-meetings that were part of the job; editing manuscripts at home.

— Toni Morrison

Whiteness, alone, is mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen, veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, implacable. Or so our writers seem to say.

— Toni Morrison

This extraordinary story you hold in your hands was specifically intended as “an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial.

— Toni Morrison

And him. Eighteen seventy-four and whitefolks were still on the loose.

— Toni Morrison

The day breeze blew her dress dry; the night wind wrinkled it.

— Toni Morrison

Any planning in a bottle is short, thought Stamp, but he knew from personal experience the pointlessness of telling a drinking man not to.

— Toni Morrison

My mother danced all night and Roberta’s was sick.

— Toni Morrison

They had become an occasional mutter, like the interior sounds a woman makes when she believes she is alone and unobserved at her work: a sth when she misses the needle’s eye; a soft moan when she sees another chip in her one good platter; the low friendly argument with which she greets the hens.

— Toni Morrison

I ain’t. Keeps him dumb. He wouldn’t know a good woman from a snake and he won’t let nobody point out the difference.

— Toni Morrison

If ever there came a morning when mercy and simple good fortune took to their heels and fled, grace alone might have to do.

— Toni Morrison

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.

— Toni Morrison

They settled into the long learning of one another: preferences, habits altered, others acquired; disagreement without bile; trust and that wordless conversation that years of companionship rest on.

— Toni Morrison

White but European which was not as bad as white and American;.

— Toni Morrison

Well, you know, doctors need to work on the dead poor so they can help the live rich.

— Toni Morrison

After Hiroshima, the musicians understood as early as anyone that Truman’s bomb changed everything and only scat and bebop could say how.

— Toni Morrison

Exactly the way old folks said: not when you call Him; not when you want Him; only when you need Him and right on time.

— Toni Morrison

Every dictator gets rid of the artist first... They burn the books and execute the artist first... Art might do something. It’s dangerous.

— Toni Morrison
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