Quote

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.

Toni Morrison

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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
Eye
Stem
Peach
Death
Saturday
Sunk
Thought
Closed
Stems
World
Grass
Peaches
Spring
Pits
Empty
Ants
Went
Split
Eyes
Splits
Milkweed

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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.
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Each member of the family in his own cell of consciousness, each making his own patchwork quilt of reality - collecting fragments of experience here, pieces of information there. From the tiny impressions gleaned from one another, they created a sense of belonging and tried to make do with the way they found each other.
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You rely on a sentence to say more than the denotation and the connotation you revel in the smoke that the words send up.
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Think of anybody - Dostoevsky or Jane Austen - [their work] was always something that now we would call political. So I don't see those separations too much, between what is artistic and what is political. Maybe in painting... no, I don't even believe that.
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When you stiffen, you know that whatever you stiffen about is very important. The stuff is important, the fear itself is information.
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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.
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I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.
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One of my kids was born in 1968. There were going to be political difficulties, but they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to.
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You been gone too long, Sula. Not too long, but maybe too far.
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We read about how Ajax and Achilles will die for each other, but very little about the friendship of women.
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There is really nothing more to say - except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.
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Grab this land! Take it, hold it, my brothers, make it, my brothers, shake it, squeeze it, turn it, twist it, beat it, kick it, kiss it, whip it, stomp it, dig it, plow it, seed it, reap it, rent it, buy it, sell it, own it, build it, multiply it, and pass it on — can you hear me? Pass it on!
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Beauty was not simply something to behold it was something one could do.
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My metaphor is that evil always has a top hat and a cape, and goodness is over there in the corner. For me it's just too easy, if you hate your country or your wife, so you kill them. You can't think through that, you can't feel through that, you can't do the work. And now we have guns. Solution? I don't think so.
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Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.
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Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers - not the defined.
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I know there's some poetry that sort of sounds like daisies, but most of the good poetry is also [political], you can feel the heartbeat it's about some situation that concerns human beings under duress. It's suggesting a solution, or just acknowledging that [the situation] exists. Art does that.
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Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers.
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I'm not entangled in shaping my work according to other people's views of how I should have done it.
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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.
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