Toni Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18, 1931) is an American novelist, essayist, editor, teacher, and professor emeritus at Princeton University.
If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down.
You looked at me then like you knew me, and I thought it really was Eden, and I couldn't take your eyes in because I was loving the hoof marks on your cheeks.
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.
But Jude,' she would say, 'you knew me. All those days and years, Jude, you knew me. My ways and my hands and how my stomach folded and how we tried to get Mickey to nurse and how about that time when the landlord said. . . but you said. . . and I cried, Jude. You knew me and had listened to the things I said in the night, and heard me in the bathroom and laughed at my raggedy girdle and I laughed too because I knew you too, Jude. So how could you leave me when you knew me?
Everything depends on knowing how much,” she said, and “Good is knowing when to stop.
When she awoke there was a melody in her head she could not identify or recall ever hearing before. 'Perhaps I made it up,' she thought. Then it came to her - the name of the song and all its lyrics just as she had heard it many times before. She sat on the edge of the bed thinking, 'There aren't any more new songs and I have sung all the ones there are. I have sung them all. I have sung all the songs there are.
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.
Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.
Long before I was a success, my parents made me feel like I could be one.
Nobody loved her and she wouldn’t have liked it if they had, she considered love a serious disability.
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.
Now he knew why he loved her so. Without ever leaving the ground, she could fly. 'There must be another one like you,' he whispered to her. 'There's got to be at least one more woman like you.
Sifting daylight dissolves the memory, turns it into dust motes floating in light.
To get to a place where you could love anything you chose--not to need permission for desire--well now _that_ was freedom.
I don't know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.
Misery don't call ahead. That's why you have to stay awake - otherwise it just walks on in your door.
You need intelligence, and you need to look. You need a gaze, a wide gaze, penetrating and roving - thats what's useful for art.
We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.
I sang "O Holy Night" in a school choir. My mother came and listened to me and complimented me. So that was the high point. I cannot sing a note.
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.