Toni Morrison quotes

If there’s a book you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it. – Toni Morrison

Make a difference about something other than yourselves. – Toni Morrison

I tell my students, ‘When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.’ – Toni Morrison

You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down. – Toni Morrison

As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think. – Toni Morrison

Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all. – Toni Morrison

I am my best work—a series of road maps, reports, recipes, doodles, and prayers from the front lines. – Toni Morrison

Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined. – Toni Morrison

What’s the world for you if you can’t make it up the way you want it? – Toni Morrison

You are your best thing. – Toni Morrison

You are your best thing. – Toni Morrison

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. – Toni Morrison

If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down. – Toni Morrison

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. – Toni Morrison

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. – Toni Morrison

Anything dead coming back to life hurts. – Toni Morrison

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives. – Toni Morrison

I don’t think you can be serious about your work unless you identify yourself lovingly, not egotistically, with it. That’s your baby. You don’t abandon your child on the side of the road. You’d be surprised how many people do just that. – Toni Morrison

There is really nothing more to say-except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how. – Toni Morrison

Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another. – Toni Morrison

If you can only be tall because someone’s on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And my feeling is white people have a very, very serious problem. – Toni Morrison

There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship’s, smooths and contains the rocker. It’s an inside kind—wrapped tight like skin. – Toni Morrison

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. – Toni Morrison

If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it. – Toni Morrison

What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not? – Toni Morrison

What’s the greater risk? Letting go of what people think—or letting go of how I feel, what I believe, and who I am? – Toni Morrison

All of a sudden I’m burning the way books burn. – Toni Morrison

Don’t beg anybody for anything, especially love. – Toni Morrison

If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it. – Toni Morrison

The function of freedom is to free someone else. – Toni Morrison

You got to take the crooked with the straights. – Toni Morrison

The only way you can be a mark is if you want something. – Toni Morrison

When a man or a woman is born—alive and breathing—there must be something behind it. And everything behind it has something ahead of it. The future of every birth must have been expensive and uncertain. The future of this one is. – Toni Morrison

Don’t ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it. – Toni Morrison

Guard your heart. Whatever you do, guard your heart. – Toni Morrison

If you want to see something different, you have to do something different. – Toni Morrison

When you’re not being treated right, you have to scratch, kick, scream, and fight for the life you want. – Toni Morrison

When you know who you are, you can stop talking to yourself. – Toni Morrison

If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive. – Toni Morrison

There are things you do when you are awake and things that you do when you are asleep but the same life is living the entire time. – Toni Morrison

You do not live in an unspiritual age. It is one of the things that everything believes in, if you think about music. – Toni Morrison

If you take one step toward God, God will take two steps toward you. – Toni Morrison

Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams, and misunderstandings are more thrilling than understanding could ever be. – Toni Morrison

Let me tell you bout being rich. It don’t have nothing to do with money. It have to do with being at home with yourself. – Toni Morrison

You are your best thing. – Toni Morrison

Love is the breath inside breath. – Toni Morrison

Maybe home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition. – Toni Morrison

The function of racism is distraction. The function of art is distraction. – Toni Morrison

I’m always annoyed about why black people have to bear the brunt of everybody else’s contempt. – Toni Morrison

Like our lives and our hopes, our losses and fears formed a bond invisible as algebra, but one that imprisoned us altogether, even though we had different addresses and different last names. – Toni Morrison