110+ Toni Morrison Quotes On Writing, Education And Success

Toni Morrison was an American novelist, essayist, editor, and professor who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. She is best known for her novels about the African-American experience, such as Beloved, Song of Solomon, and The Bluest Eye. Her works are praised for their unique and powerful language, as well as their insight into the complexities of race, gender, and class. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Toni Morrison on love, life, writing.

Top 10 Toni Morrison Quotes

1. You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.
2. I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer - its dust and lowering skies.
3. If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down.
4. The function of freedom is to free someone else.
5. Don’t beg anybody for anything, especially love.
6. There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race - scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct... it has a social function, racism.
7. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.
8. If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.
9. In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent.
10. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

Toni Morrison Image Quotes

If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down. — Toni Morrison

At some point in life, the world's beauty becomes enough. — Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison Short Quotes

• All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.
• You free. Nothing and nobody is obliged to save you but you.
• We're all surrounded by what I call faux language, fake language of commerce, of news media.
• When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.
• Laughter is more serious than tears.
• The isolation, the separateness, is always a part of any utopia.
• Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?
• Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face; you are me.
• I am in the position of judging people by the best they've ever done rather than the worst.
• My world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.

Toni Morrison Quotes About Love

Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it. — Toni Morrison

Love it, love it and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize. — Toni Morrison

Love just seems to make life not just livable, but a gallant, gallant event. — Toni Morrison

Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God. — Toni Morrison

My first-born. All I can remember of her is how she loved the burned bottom of bread. Can you beat that? Eight children and that's all I remember. — Toni Morrison

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. — Toni Morrison

And I am all the things I have ever loved: scuppernong wine, cool baptisms in silent water, dream books and number playing. — Toni Morrison

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

Unless carefree, mother love was a killer. — Toni Morrison

They encouraged you to put some of your weight in their hands and soon as you felt how light and lovely it was, they studied your scars and tribulations... — Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison Quotes About Life

At some point in life, the world's beauty becomes enough. — Toni Morrison

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. — Toni Morrison

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

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. — Toni Morrison

From my point of view, which is that of a storyteller, I see your life as something artful, waiting, just waiting and ready for you to make it art. — Toni Morrison

Anything dead coming back to life hurts. — Toni Morrison

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. — Toni Morrison

I don't want you to write about what you know, because you don't know anything. I don't want to hear about your boyfriend or your grandma... I'm getting a little tired of 'my life story as fiction'. Please don't tell me about your little life - is there nothing larger? More important? — Toni Morrison

The past is interesting to me because it's been dumbed down or flattened out, or academically nitpicked so you can't get any life out of it, you just get data. — Toni Morrison

Most of the really good literature I've read in my life was political, meaning it was important - about something going on in the history of the world - or contemporary. — Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison Quotes About Writing

The writing is - I'm free of pain. It's the place where I live; it's where I have control; it's where nobody tells me what to do; it's where my imagination is fecund and I am really at my best. Nothing matters more in the world or in my body or anywhere when I'm writing. — Toni Morrison

I tell my students there is such a thing as 'writer's block,' and they should respect it. You shouldn't write through it. It's blocked because it ought to be blocked, because you haven't got it right now. — Toni Morrison

I can't explain inspiration. A writer is either compelled to write or not. And if I waited for inspiration I wouldn't really be a writer. — Toni Morrison

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

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. — Toni Morrison

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic. — Toni Morrison

Sex is difficult to write about because it's just not sexy enough. The only way to write about it is not to write much. Let the reader bring his own sexuality into the text. A writer I usually admire has written about sex in the most off-putting way. There is just too much information. — Toni Morrison

Usually I try to be there by six. Everything has been taken off the walls so that there's nothing to arrest my sight. On the bed I have Roget's Thesaurus, a dictionary, a Bible, and a deck of playing cards. — Toni Morrison

The formula for creative writing in high school or college is write what you know. And I said they don't know nothing. Imagine something. Do you know what it's like to be a Madame in Paris, when you're too old to have any clients. No, you don't. I don't either. Write about it. — Toni Morrison

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 — Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison Quotes About Success

Most of our lives are spent in little towns, little towns all throughout the country. That's where we live. And that's where the juices come from and that's where we made it, not made it in terms of success but made who we are. — Toni Morrison

Long before I was a success, my parents made me feel like I could be one. — Toni Morrison

Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul. — Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison Quotes About Freedom

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. — Toni Morrison

We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom. — Toni Morrison

Movements toward freedom and the self-respect that comes from something other than what people think is their most important feature. — Toni Morrison

To get to a place where you could love anything you chose--not to need permission for desire--well now _that_ was freedom. — Toni Morrison

Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It's not having no responsibilitie s; it's choosing the ones you want. — Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison Quotes About Reading

As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer. — Toni Morrison

I think one of the reasons I'm so thrilled with writing is because it is an act of reading for me at the same time, which is why my revisions are so sustained. — Toni Morrison

I have the wonderful pleasure of finishing the book and closing it. And I don't read them later. — Toni Morrison

We read about how Ajax and Achilles will die for each other, but very little about the friendship of women. — Toni Morrison

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. — Toni Morrison

When I write, I don't translate for white readers.... Dostoevski wrote for a Russian audience, but we're able to read him. If I'm specific, and I don't overexplain, then anyone can overhear me. — Toni Morrison

If you can't count, they can cheat you. If you can't read, they can beat you. — Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison Quotes About Pieces

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

The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order. — Toni Morrison

Sweet, she thought. He must think I can't bear to hear him say it. That after all I have told him and after telling me how many feet I have, "goodbye" would break me to pieces. Ain't that sweet. "So long," she murmured from the far side of the trees. — Toni Morrison

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. — Toni Morrison

A friend gathers all the pieces and gives them back in the right order. — 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

...the City is what they want it to be: thriftless, warm, scary and full of amiable strangers. No wonder they forget pebbly creeks and when they do not forget the sky completely think of it as a tiny piece of information about the time of day or night. — Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison Quotes About Friend

A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves - a special kind of double. — Toni Morrison

Black women have always been friends. I mean, if you didn't have each other you had nothing. — Toni Morrison

I don't think I knew any of my father's friends - male friends - by their real names. I remember them only by their nicknames. — Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison Quotes About Mind

The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one. — Toni Morrison

Books ARE a form of political action. Books are knowledge. Books are reflection. Books change your mind. — Toni Morrison

Her mind traveled crooked streets and aimless goat paths, arriving sometimes at profundity, other times at the revelations of a three-year-old. Throughout this fresh, if common, pursuit of knowledge, one conviction crowned her efforts: ...she knew there was nothing to fear. — Toni Morrison

Girl, I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me...my lonely is mine. — Toni Morrison

Lay my head on the railroad line. Train come along; pacify my mind. — Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison Famous Quotes And Sayings

If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down. — Toni Morrison

I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge - even wisdom. Like art. — Toni Morrison

Racism will disappear when it's no longer profitable, and no longer psychologically useful. And when that happens, it'll be gone. But at the moment, people make a lot of money off of it, pro and con. — Toni Morrison

Please don't settle for happiness. It's not good enough. Of course you deserve it, but if that's all you have in mind - happiness - I want to suggest to you that personal success devoid of meaningfulness, free of a steady commitment to social justice - that's more than a barren life. It's a trivial one. — Toni Morrison

At some point in life, the world's beauty becomes enough. — Toni Morrison

They seemed to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds― cooled ―and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path. — Toni Morrison

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. — Toni Morrison

I am a writer and my faith in the world of art is intense, but not irrational, nor naïve - because art takes us and makes us take a journey beyond price, beyond cost, into bearing witness to the world as it is and as it should be. Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances. — Toni Morrison

I really want some meaning. It used to be easy to toss it off. Now it's harder and harder. You have to navigate just to find something that has nourishment. It's the absence of nourishment. What do you do in place of nourishment? It's usually junk. Either it's junk food or junk clothes or junk ideas. — Toni Morrison

When a child walks in the room, your child or anybody else’s child, do your eyes light up? That’s what they’re looking for. — Toni Morrison

Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not, permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas. — Toni Morrison

Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be. — Toni Morrison

You are your own stories and therefore free to imagine and experience what it means to be human... And although you don't have complete control over the narrative - no author does, I can tell you - you could nevertheless create it. — Toni Morrison

Each member of the family in his own cell of consciousness, each making his own patchwork quilt of reality - collecting fragments of experience here, pieces of information there. From the tiny impressions gleaned from one another, they created a sense of belonging and tried to make do with the way they found each other. — 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

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. — Toni Morrison

I know what every colored woman in this country is doing... Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I’m going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world. — Toni Morrison

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

An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. 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

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. — Toni Morrison

In Tar Baby, the classic concept of the individual with a solid, coherent identity is eschewed for a model of identity which sees the individual as a kaleidoscope of heterogeneous impulses and desires, constructed from multiple forms of interaction with the world as a play of difference that cannot be completely comprehended. — Toni Morrison

Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this mission. — Toni Morrison

The theme you choose may change or simply elude you, but being your own story means you can always choose the tone. It also means that you can invent the language to say who are you and what you mean. — Toni Morrison

She learned the intricacy of loneliness: the horror of color, the roar of soundlessness and the menace of familiar objects lying still. — Toni Morrison

Unpersecuted, unjailed, unharrassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world's resources. — Toni Morrison

Grown don't mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What's that supposed to mean? In my heart it don't mean a thing. — Toni Morrison

American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen. — Toni Morrison

In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can't take positions that are closed. Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book -- leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity. — Toni Morrison

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. — Toni Morrison

For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land. — Toni Morrison

If you take racism away from certain people - I mean, vitriolic racism as well as the sort of social racist - if you take that away, they may have to face something really terrible, misery, self-misery, and deep pain about who they are. — Toni Morrison

For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction. — Toni Morrison

So this is what insanity is. Not goofy behavior, but watching a sudden change in the world you used to know. — Toni Morrison

Jealousy we understood and thought natural... But envy was a strange, new feeling for us. And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us. — Toni Morrison

Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers - not the defined. — Toni Morrison

I don't believe any real artists have ever been non-political. They may have been insensitive to this particular plight or insensitive to that, but they were political, because that's what an artist is-a politician. — Toni Morrison

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. — Toni Morrison

Home is memory, home is your history, home is where you work. Some people want to abandon it and become truly local. But the questions are all there. — Toni Morrison

Not knowing it was hard; knowing it was harder — Toni Morrison

Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live — Toni Morrison

The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers. — Toni Morrison

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

There is no civilization that did not begin with art, Whether it was drawing a line in the sand, painting a cave or dancing. — Toni Morrison

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. — Toni Morrison

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. — Toni Morrison

Let your face speak what's in your heart. When my kids walk in the room my face says I'm glad to see them. — Toni Morrison

I remember a very important lesson that my father gave me when I was twelve or thirteen. He said, "You know, today I welded a perfect seam and I signed my name to it." And I said, "But, Daddy, no one's going to see it!" And he said, "Yeah, but I know it's there." So when I was working in kitchens, I did good work. — Toni Morrison

Sifting daylight dissolves the memory, turns it into dust motes floating in light. — Toni Morrison

You need intelligence, and you need to look. You need a gaze, a wide gaze, penetrating and roving - thats what's useful for art. — Toni Morrison

Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth. — Toni Morrison

You rely on a sentence to say more than the denotation and the connotation; you revel in the smoke that the words send up. — Toni Morrison

No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you. — Toni Morrison

He wants to put his story next to hers. — Toni Morrison

Can't nothing heal without pain, you know. — Toni Morrison

Isolation, you know, carries the seeds of its own destruction because as times change, other things seep in. — Toni Morrison

Like Guitar in Son of Solomon, and Son in Tar Baby, he believed that harmony could never exist between the races. — Toni Morrison

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. — Toni Morrison

Anything I have ever learned of any consequence, I have learned from Black people. I have never been bored by any Black person, ever. — Toni Morrison

It had been the longest time since she had had a rib-scraping laugh. She had forgotten how deep and down it could be. So different from the miscellaneous giggles and smiles she had learned to be content with these past few years. — Toni Morrison

My home is such a powerfully imaginative place that the space is almost irrelevant. I think the house I live at on the Hudson is where I belong because it's the only place where I am that I never think about when I'm leaving. — Toni Morrison

Well, feel this, why don't you? Feel how it feels to have a bed to sleep in and somebody there not worrying you to death about what you got to do each day to deserve it. Feel how that feels. And if that don't get it, feel how it feels to be a colored woman roaming the roads with anything God made liable to jump on you. Feel that. — Toni Morrison

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) — Toni Morrison

Life Lessons by Toni Morrison

1. Toni Morrison's works emphasize the importance of understanding and appreciating one's own culture and heritage. She also encourages readers to be open to other cultures and to recognize the beauty of diversity.
2. Through her stories, Morrison conveys the idea that every life has value and that everyone should be respected and treated with dignity.
3. Her works also explore themes of identity, racism, and the power of language, reminding us of the importance of standing up for what is right and finding strength in our own stories.