If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.
You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.
Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.
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.
She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.
Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.
And I am all the things I have ever loved: scuppernong wine, cool baptisms in silent water, dream books and number playing.
Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.
Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.
Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.
You are your best thing
In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.
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.
What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?
Love is never any better than the lover.
As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.
The function of freedom is to free someone else.
If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.
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.
It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.
He wants to put his story next to hers.
It was a fine cry - loud and long - but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.
Anything dead coming back to life hurts.
Lonely was much better than alone.
Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.
![All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.
[Conversation with Elizabeth Farnsworth, PBS NewsHour, March 9, 1998]](https://quotes.thefamouspeople.com/images/quotes/toni-morrison-54161.jpg)
All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in. [Conversation with Elizabeth Farnsworth, PBS NewsHour, March 9, 1998]
If they put an iron circle around your neck I will bite it away
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.
A dream is just a nightmare with lipstick.
She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.
All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.
I dream a dream that dreams back at me
Not knowing it was hard; knowing it was harder
To get to a place where you could love anything you chose--not to need permission for desire--well now _that_ was freedom.
Something that is loved is never lost.
They encouraged you to put some of your weight in their hands and soon as you felt how light and lovely it was, they studied your scars and tribulations...
If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.
What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.
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?
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The hopelessness that comes from knowing too little and feeling too much (so brittle, so dry he is in danger of the reverse: feeling nothing and knowing everything)
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.
Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.
She learned the intricacy of loneliness: the horror of color, the roar of soundlessness and the menace of familiar objects lying still.
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.
Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.
I don't think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It's perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man.
The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.
Today is always here,' said Sethe. 'Tomorrow, never.
But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.
When you gone to get married? You need to have some babies. It’ll settle you.' 'I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.
Was it hard? I hope she didn't die hard.' Sethe shook her head. 'Soft as cream. Being alive was the hard part.
But the picking out, the choosing. Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it. I saw you and made up my mind. My mind.
Sunk in the grass of an empty lot on a spring Saturday, I split the stems of milkweed and thought about ants and peach pits and death and where the world went when I closed my eyes.
There in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning.
I don't think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they're black or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money. That's what we're upset about.
It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love ... You can't own a human being.
I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.
I always looked upon the acts of racist exclusion, or insult, as pitiable, for the other person. I never absorbed that. I always thought that there was something deficient about such people.
He licked his lips. ‘Well, if you want my opinion-‘ ‘I don’t, ‘ She said. ‘I have my own.
I wish I’d a knowed more people. I would of loved ‘em all. If I’d a knowed more, I would a loved more
It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves.
No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you.
She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.
If you surrender to the wind you can ride it.
You looking good." "Devil's confusion. He lets me look good long as I feel bad.
Everything depends on knowing how much,” she said, and “Good is knowing when to stop.
We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.
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.
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?
In Ohio seasons are theatrical. Each one enters like a prima donna, convinced its performance is the reason the world has people in it.
...the change was adjustment without improvement.
I'm not entangled in shaping my work according to other people's views of how I should have done it.
For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction.
Love is divine only and difficult always.
You your best thing, Sethe. You are.
I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me.
You don't have to love me but you damn well have to respect me.
You been gone too long, Sula. Not too long, but maybe too far.
You got two feet, Sethe, not four." he said, and right then a forest sprang up between them; tactless and quiet.
Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love a free man is never safe.
Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.
No matter how hard we try to ignore it, the mind always knows truth and wants clarity.
The loss pressed down on her chest and came up into her throat. it was a fine cry -- loud and long -- but it had no bottom and no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.
Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live
Perhaps that's what all human relationships boil down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?
I get angry about things, then go on and work.
How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.
For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.
How come it can't fly no better than a chicken?" "Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.
I write the way women have babies. You don't know it's going to be like that. If you did, there's no way you would go through with it.
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.
The real hell of Hell is that it is forever.' Sula said that. She said doing anything forever and ever was hell.
When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world?
O Lord, Sula,” she cried, “girl, girl, girlgirlgirl.” It was a fine cry—loud and long—but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.
