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Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Toni Morrison Quotes

You are your best thing quote by Toni Morrison

‘Sethe’, he says, ‘me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.’
He leans over and takes her hand. With the other he touches her face. ‘You your best thing, Sethe, You are.’ His holding fingers are holding hers.
‘Me? Me?’.

– Toni Morrison

Beloved. Paul D and Sethe in Chapter 27.

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

– Toni Morrison

No one ever talks about the moment you found that you were white. Or the moment you found out you were black. That’s a profound revelation. The minute you find that out, something happens. You have to renegotiate everything.

– Toni Morrison

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.

– Toni Morrison

Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.

– Toni Morrison

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

– Toni Morrison

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

– Toni Morrison

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.

– Toni Morrison

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

– Toni Morrison

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.

– 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.

– Toni Morrison

As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.

– Toni Morrison

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

– Toni Morrison

Somebody has to take responsibility for being a leader.

– Toni Morrison

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

– Toni Morrison

I like marriage. The idea.

– Toni Morrison

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

– Toni Morrison

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

– Toni Morrison

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.

– Toni Morrison

Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.

– Toni Morrison

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

– Toni Morrison

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.

– Toni Morrison

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

– Toni Morrison

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.

– Toni Morrison

Make a difference about something other than yourselves.

– Toni Morrison

Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

– Toni Morrison

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.

– Toni Morrison