Quote

When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.

Toni Morrison

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Toni Morrison
Age: 88 †
Born: 1931
Born: February 18
Died: 2019
Died: August 5
Audiobook Narrator
Librettist
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Lorain
Ohio
Chloe Ardelia Wofford
Chloe Anthony Wofford-Morrison
Chloe Anthony Wofford
Morrison
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison
Sympathy
Comfort
Suffering
Words
Pain

More quotes by Toni Morrison

Image
Race is the least reliable information you can have about someone. It's real information, but it tells you next to nothing.
Toni Morrison
Image
If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up.
Toni Morrison
Image
No gasp at a miracle that is truly miraculous because the magic lies in the fact that you knew it was there for you all along.
Toni Morrison
Image
The seeds of destruction lie in the definition of chosen-ness and can easily blossom into bigotry. It's not inevitable but it needs constant care to avoid.
Toni Morrison
Image
Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers - not the defined.
Toni Morrison
Image
You rely on a sentence to say more than the denotation and the connotation you revel in the smoke that the words send up.
Toni Morrison
Image
...the City is what they want it to be: thriftless, warm, scary and full of amiable strangers. No wonder they forget pebbly creeks and when they do not forget the sky completely think of it as a tiny piece of information about the time of day or night.
Toni Morrison
Image
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.
Toni Morrison
Image
Usually I try to be there by six. Everything has been taken off the walls so that there's nothing to arrest my sight. On the bed I have Roget's Thesaurus, a dictionary, a Bible, and a deck of playing cards.
Toni Morrison
Image
I sometimes lose interest in the characters and get much more interested in the trees and animals.
Toni Morrison
Image
What do you say? There really are no words for that. There really aren't. Somebody tries to say, 'I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.' People say that to me. There's no language for it. Sorry doesn't do it. I think you should just hug people and mop their floor or something.
Toni Morrison
Image
Unpersecuted, unjailed, unharrassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world's resources.
Toni Morrison
Image
Evil is just sort of ultimately boring. The good thing is just complicated. It's more provocative to me and more stimulating to me.
Toni Morrison
Image
I don't want you to write about what you know, because you don't know anything. I don't want to hear about your boyfriend or your grandma... I'm getting a little tired of 'my life story as fiction'. Please don't tell me about your little life - is there nothing larger? More important?
Toni Morrison
Image
If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.
Toni Morrison
Image
I'm not entangled in shaping my work according to other people's views of how I should have done it.
Toni Morrison
Image
You been gone too long, Sula. Not too long, but maybe too far.
Toni Morrison
Image
Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not, permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.
Toni Morrison
Image
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
Toni Morrison
Image
All important things are hard.
Toni Morrison