101 best Toni Morrison quotes from Beloved, Sula, Jazz, Song of Solomon and on subjects of love, writing, and life

“Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.”

“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.”

“Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.”

​​“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.”

“You are your best thing”

“There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind--wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one's own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.”

“Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.”

“He licked his lips. ‘Well, if you want my opinion-‘I don’t, ‘ She said. ‘I have my own.”

“He wants to put his story next to hers.”

“Something that is loved is never lost.”

“When you gone to get married? You need to have some babies. It’ll settle you.'I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.”

“Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.”

It was a fine cry - loud and long - but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.

“Lonely, ain't it? Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else's. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain't that something? A secondhand lonely.”

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

“She had been looking all along for a friend, and it took her a while to discover that a lover was not a comrade and could never be - for a woman. And that no one would ever be that version of herself which she sought to reach out to and touch with an ungloved hand. There was only her own mood and whim, and if that was all there was, she decided to turn the naked hand toward it, discover it and let others become as intimate with their own selves as she was.”

“There in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning. ”

“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.”

“I sure did live in this world.'Really? What have you got to show for it?'Show? To who? I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me.'Lonely, ain't it?'Yes. But my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else's. Made by somebody else and handed to you.”

“Being good to somebody is just like being mean to somebody. Risky. You don't get nothing for it.”

’Jazz’ Toni Morrison quotes

“Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.”

“Pain. I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweettooth for it. Bolts of lightning, little rivulets of thunder.And I the eye of the storm.”

“What's the world for you if you can't make it up the way you want it?”

“But the picking out, the choosing. Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it. I saw you and made up my mind. My mind.”

“the hopelessness that comes from knowing too little and feeling too much (so brittle, so dry he is in danger of the reverse: feeling nothing and knowing everything)”

“Nobody gave you to me. Nobody said that’s the one for you. I picked you out. Wrong time, yep, and doing wrong by my wife. But the picking out, the choosing. Don’t ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it. I saw you and made up my mind. My mind. And I made up my mind to follow you too.”

“Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.”

“When they fall in love with a city, it is for forever and it is like forever.”

“Whatever happens, whether you get rich or stay poor, ruin your health or live to old age, you always end up back where you started: hungry for the one thing everybody loses - young loving.”

“A son ain't what a woman say. A son is what a man do.”

“Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye.”

“Love is never any better than the lover.”

“Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.”

“Lonely was much better than alone.”

“Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.”

“We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.”

“She left me the way people leave a hotel room. A hotel room is a place to be when you are doing something else. Of itself it is of no consequence to one's major scheme. A hotel room is convenient. But its convenience is limited to the time you need it while you are in that particular town on that particular business; you hope it is comfortable, but prefer, rather, that it be anoymous. It is not, after all, where you live.”

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

“Sunk in the grass of an empty lot on a spring Saturday, I split the stems of milkweed and thought about ants and peach pits and death and where the world went when I closed my eyes.”

“And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.”

“You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”

“You can't own a human being. You can't lose what you don't own. Suppose you did own him. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that? Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door? You don't, do you? And neither does he. You're turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can't value you more than you value yourself.”

“She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it's there, because it can't hurt, and because what difference does it make?”

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

“Gimme hate, Lord,” he whimpered. “I’ll take hate any day. But don’t give me love. I can’t take no more love, Lord. I can’t carry it...It’s too heavy. Jesus, you know, you know all about it. Ain’t it heavy? Jesus? Ain’t love heavy?”

“I wish I’d a knowed more people. I would of loved ‘em all. If I’d a knowed more, I would a loved more”

“Perhaps that's what all human relationships boil down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?”

“It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love ... You can't own a human being.”

“In fact her maturity and blood kinship converted her passion to fever, so it was more affliction than affection. It literally knocked her down at night, and raised her up in the morning, for when she dragged herself off to bed, having spent another day without his presence, her heart beat like a gloved fist against her ribs. And in the morning, long before she was fully awake, she felt a longing so bitter and tight it yanked her out of a sleep swept clean of dreams.”

“Now he knew why he loved her so. Without ever leaving the ground, she could fly. 'There must be another one like you,' he whispered to her. 'There's got to be at least one more woman like you.”

“The function of freedom is to free someone else.”

“When I woke up I reminded myself that freedom is never free. You have to fight for it. Work for it and make sure you are able to handle it.” – Toni Morrison

“Look to yourself. You free. Nothing and nobody is obliged to save you but you... Somewhere inside you is that free person I'm talking about. Locate her and let her do some good in the world.”

“To be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing.”

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

“I am suggesting that we pay as much attention to our nurturing sensibilities as to our ambition. You are moving in the direction of freedom, and the function of freedom is to free somebody else. You are moving toward self-fulfillment, and the consequences of that fulfillment should be to discover that there is something just as important as you are.”

“Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It’s not having no responsibilitie s; it’s choosing the ones you want.”

“I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.”

“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”

“We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.”

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”

“Make up a story... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.”

“Writing is really a way of thinking--not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.”

“People say to write about what you know. I'm here to tell you, no one wants to read that, cos you don't know anything. So write about something you don't know. And don't be scared, ever.”

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

It is what you don’t write that frequently gives what you do write its power.

“There's a difference between writing for a living and writing for life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises....If you write for life, you'll work hard; you'll do what's honest, not what pays”

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.

My world did not shrink because I was a Black female writer. It just got bigger.

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

“At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.”

“Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another--physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.”

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

“Anything dead coming back to life hurts.”

“I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life.”

“Birth, life, and death― each took place on the hidden side of a leaf.”

“A writer's life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.”

“A child. New life. Immune to evil or illness, protected from kidnap, beatings, rape, racism, insult, hurt, self-loathing, abandonment. Error-free. All goodness. Minus wrath. So they believe.”

“You’re turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can’t value you more than you value yourself.”

“Death is a sure thing but life is just as certain. Problem is you can't know in advance.”

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

“Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you'd have a little love left over for the next one.”

“Nowadays silence is looked on as odd and most of my race has forgotten the beauty of meaning much by saying little. Now tongues work all day by themselves with no help from the mind.”

“How soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like forever. As though there never was a time when they didn't love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves.”

“Do they still call it infatuation? That magic ax that chops away the world in one blow, leaving only the couple standing there trembling? Whatever they call it, it leaps over anything, takes the biggest chair, the largest slice, rules the ground wherever it walks, from a mansion to a swamp, and its selfishness is its beauty.... People with no imagination feed it with sex -- the clown of love. They don't know the real kinds, the better kinds, where losses are cut and everybody benefits. It takes a certain intelligence to love like that -- softly, without props.”

“Maybe that was love. Choking sounds and silence.”

“Hate does that. Burns off everything but itself, so whatever your grievance is, your face looks just like your enemy's.”

“I've traveled. All over. I've never seen anything like you. How could anything be put together like you? Do you know how beautiful you are? Have you looked at yourself?' I'm looking now.”

“Nobody loved her and she wouldn’t have liked it if they had, she considered love a serious disability.”

“A woman is an important somebody and sometimes you win the triple crown: good food, good sex, and good talk. Most men settle for any one, happy as a clam if they get two. But listen, let me tell you something. A good man is a good thing, but there is nothing in the world better than a good good woman. She can be your mother, your wife, your girlfriend, your sister, or somebody you work next to. Don’t matter. You find one, stay there. You see a scary one, make tracks.”

“Apparently he thought he deserved only to be loved--from a distance, though--and given what he wanted. And in return he would be . . . what? Pleasant? Generous? Maybe all he was really saying was: I am not responsible for your pain; share your happiness with me but not your unhappiness.”

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.

“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. ”

“I don't think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they're black or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money. That's what we're upset about.”

“Where do you get the right to decide our lives? I'll tell you where. From that little hog's gut that hangs between your legs. Well, let me tell you something... you will need more than that. I don't know where you will get it or who will give it to you, but mark my words, you will need more than that.... You are a sad, pitiful, stupid, selfish, hateful man. I hope your little hog's gut stands you in good stead, and you take good care of it, because you don't have anything else.”

“You think because he doesn't love you that you are worthless. You think because he doesn't want you anymore that he is right- that his judgement and opinion of you are correct. If he throws you out, then you are garbage. You think he belongs to you because you want to belong to him. Hagar, don't. It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love. Love shouldn't be like that.”

“I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither.... So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.”

“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.”

“Black women were armed, black women were dangerous and the less money they had the deadlier the weapon they chose.”

“I think women dwell quite a bit on the duress under which they work, on how hard it is just to do it at all. We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped creative work in there between the domestic chores and obligations. I'm not sure we deserve such big A-pluses for all that.”

“In your rainbow journey toward the realization of personal goals, don’t make choices based only on your security and your safety. Nothing is safe. That is not to say that anything ever was, or that anything worth achieving ever should be. Things of value seldom are. It is not safe to have a child. It is not safe to challenge the status quo. It is not safe to choose work that has not been done before. Or to do old work in a new way. There will always be someone there to stop you.”