Toni Morrison Quotes - Page 2

God puzzled her and she was too ashamed of Him to say so.

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

No gasp at a miracle that is truly miraculous because the magic lies in the fact that you knew it was there for you all along.

What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?

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

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]

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

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.

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

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.

I'm a Midwesterner, and everyone in Ohio is excited. I'm also a New Yorker, and a New Jerseyan, and an American, plus I'm an African-American, and a woman. I know it seems like I'm spreading like algae when I put it this way, but I'd like to think of the prize being distributed to these regions and nations and races.

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?

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

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.

Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.

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.

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

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. No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens - that letting go - you let go because you can.

Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

Here was an ugly little girl asking for beauty....A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes. His outrage grew and felt like power. For the first time he honestly wished he could work miracles.