Toni Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18, 1931) is an American novelist, essayist, editor, teacher, and professor emeritus at Princeton University.
Make a difference, does it? You stay the night here snake get you.
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
How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.
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.
Girl, I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me. . . my lonely is mine.
What do you say? There really are no words for that. There really aren't. Somebody tries to say, 'I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. ' People say that to me. There's no language for it. Sorry doesn't do it. I think you should just hug people and mop their floor or something.
A dream is just a nightmare with lipstick.
Wait, wait, wait, wait. Don't try to write through it, to force it. Many do, but that won't work. Just wait, it will come.
And I am all the things I have ever loved: scuppernong wine, cool baptisms in silent water, dream books and number playing.
Lonely, ain't it? Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else's. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain't that something? A secondhand lonely.
In my mother's church, everybody read the Bible and it was mostly about music. My mother had the most beautiful voice I have ever heard in my life. She could sing anything - classical, jazz, blues, opera. And people came from long distances to that little church she went to - African Methodist Episcopal, the AME church she belonged to - just hear her.
Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.
Let your face speak what's in your heart.
All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.
Sometimes Joyce is hilarious. I read Finnegans Wake after graduate school and I had the great good fortune of reading it without any help. I don't know if I read it right, but it was hilarious! I laughed constantly! I didn't know what was going on for whole blocks but it didn't matter because I wasn't going to be graded on it. I think the reason why everyone still has so much fun with Shakespeare is because he didn't have any literary critic. He was just doing it; and there were no reviews except for people throwing stuff on stage. He could just do it.
It was becoming a habit-this concentration on things behind him. Almost as though there were no future to be had. *Milkman*
If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down.
You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question.
I know there's some poetry that sort of sounds like daisies, but most of the good poetry is also [political], you can feel the heartbeat; it's about some situation that concerns human beings under duress. It's suggesting a solution, or just acknowledging that [the situation] exists. Art does that.
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.