Top 51 Quotes by Toni Morrison

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.

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.