Nobel Laureate and bestselling author, Toni Morrison gifted us with some of the best pieces of literature so far. Some of her best work probed black identity in America and continues to raise questions. Before her demise at the age of 88, she was a novelist, essayist, editor, teacher, and professor emeritus at Princeton University.
We have compiled some of quotes attributed to her that might change your perception about life, or your life in totality.
Read and be inspired!
- We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
- If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write.
- Books are a form of political action. Books are knowledge. Books are reflection. Books change your mind.
- 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.
- Don’t ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love; I rose in it.
- In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.
- The function of freedom is to free someone else.
- If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.
- Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.
- There is really nothing more to say-except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.
- A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves – a special kind of double.
- Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.
- A dream is just a nightmare with lipstick.
- All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.
- Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.
- Let me tell you something. A man ain’t a goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can’t chop down because they’re inside.
- And talking about dark! You think dark is just one color, but it ain’t. There’re five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some woolly. Some just empty. Some like fingers. And it don’t stay still, it moves and changes from one kind of black to another. Saying something is pitch black is like saying something is green. What kind of green? Green like my bottles? Green like a grasshopper? Green like a cucumber, lettuce, or green like the sky is just before it breaks loose to storm? Well, night black is the same way. May as well be a rainbow.
- Writing is really a way of thinking–not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.
- What’s the world for you if you can’t make it up the way you want it?
- But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.
- To be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing.
- The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.
- I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.
- It’s a bad word, ‘belong.’ Especially when you put it with somebody you love … You can’t own a human being.
- Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
- A writer’s life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.
- Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.
- Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.
- Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.
- As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.
- You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone.
- Your life is already artful—waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.
- Don’t ever think I fell for you or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love; I rose in it.
- I think all good art is political. None of the best writing, the best thoughts have been anything other than that.
- Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.
