Toni Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18, 1931) is an American novelist, essayist, editor, teacher, and professor emeritus at Princeton University.
Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signsall the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured
It's bliss when you give up all that stuff that separates you from other human beings. It's hard, but you break down all that stuff.
The men began to trade tales of atrocities, first stories they had heard, then those they'd witnessed, and finally the things that had happened to themselves. A litany of personal humiliation, outrage, and anger turned sicklelike back to themselves as humor. They laughed then, uproariously, about the speed with which they had run, the pose they had assumed, the ruse they had invented to escape or decrease some threat to their manliness, their humanness. All but Empire State, who stood, broom in hand and drop-lipped, with the expression of a very intelligent ten-year-old.
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.
Your life is already artful-waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.
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.
No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you.
For a long time I was convinced that the conflict between Jewish people and black people in this country was a media event.
. . . the change was adjustment without improvement.
My theory is that the world is a difficult place to live in and distraction is the name of the game.
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.
When I'm not creating or focusing on something I can imagine or invent, I think I go back over my life - I don't recommend this by the way - and you pick up, oh, what'd you do that for? Why didn't you understand this?
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.
Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.
The habit of getting up early, which I had formed when the children were young, now became my choice. I am not very bright or very witty or very inventive after the sun goes down.
Literature, it seems to me, is wisdom.
Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.
Our ancestors are an ever widening circle of hope.
The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.
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.