Toni Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18, 1931) is an American novelist, essayist, editor, teacher, and professor emeritus at Princeton University.
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.
Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.
Only her tight, tight eyes were left. They were always left. . . They were everything. Everything was there, in them. . . Thrown, in this way, into the binding conviction that only a miracle could relieve her, she would never know her beauty. She would see only what there was to see: the eyes of other people.
If he looked into her face, he would see those haunted, loving eyes. The hauntedness would irritate him - the love would move him to fury. How dare she love him? Hadn't she any sense at all? What was he supposed to do about that? Return it? How? What could his calloused hands produce to make her smile? What of his knowledge of the world and of life could be useful to her? What could his heavy arms and befuddled brain accomplish that would earn him his own respect, that would in turn allow him to accept her love?
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?
I want to discourage you from choosing anything or making any decision simply because it is safe. Things of value seldom are
. . . the change was adjustment without improvement.
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.
Unless carefree, mother love was a killer.
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.
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.
Listen, baby, people do funny things. Specially us. The cards are stacked against us and just trying to stay in the game, stay alive and in the game, makes us do funny things. Things we can't help. Things that make us hurt one another. We don't even know why.
You been gone too long, Sula. Not too long, but maybe too far.
I have the wonderful pleasure of finishing the book and closing it. And I don't read them later.
Was it hard? I hope she didn't die hard. ' Sethe shook her head. 'Soft as cream. Being alive was the hard part.
The body is ready to have babies. Nature wants it done then, when the body can handle it, not after 40, when the income can handle it.
In Ohio seasons are theatrical. Each one enters like a prima donna, convinced its performance is the reason the world has people in it.
But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.
Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.
I don't work. I keep telling people I'm unemployed. And I don't wash dishes, and I don't wash clothes, and I don't clean my house. Somebody else does that.