Quote

Every now and then she looked around for tangible evidence of his having ever been there. Where were the butterflies? the blueberries? the whistling reed? She could find nothing, for he had left nothing but his stunning absence.

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
Every
Absence
Blueberries
Looked
Reed
Evidence
Whistling
Left
Reeds
Around
Butterflies
Find
Stunning
Ever
Tangible
Nothing
Butterfly

More quotes by Toni Morrison

Image
To get to a place where you could love anything you chose--not to need permission for desire--well now _that_ was freedom.
Toni Morrison
Image
Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?
Toni Morrison
Image
Jealousy we understood and thought natural... But envy was a strange, new feeling for us. And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us.
Toni Morrison
Image
What's interesting about writing is the invention, the creative thing. Writing about myself is a yawn.
Toni Morrison
Image
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.
Toni Morrison
Image
I sang O Holy Night in a school choir. My mother came and listened to me and complimented me. So that was the high point. I cannot sing a note.
Toni Morrison
Image
Which was what love was: unmotivated respect.
Toni Morrison
Image
Love is never any better than the lover.
Toni Morrison
Image
There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race - scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct... it has a social function, racism.
Toni Morrison
Image
Nobody loved her and she wouldn’t have liked it if they had, she considered love a serious disability.
Toni Morrison
Image
Much handled things are always soft(27).
Toni Morrison
Image
Beauty was not simply something to behold it was something one could do.
Toni Morrison
Image
Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.
Toni Morrison
Image
The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one.
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
What's the world for you if you can't make it up the way you want it?
Toni Morrison
Image
It was my father who could do no wrong. So I didn't think of it as, oh, look, my father's a violent man.
Toni Morrison
Image
There is no civilization that did not begin with art, Whether it was drawing a line in the sand, painting a cave or dancing.
Toni Morrison
Image
I tell my students there is such a thing as 'writer's block,' and they should respect it. You shouldn't write through it. It's blocked because it ought to be blocked, because you haven't got it right now.
Toni Morrison
Image
Language can never 'pin down' slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity, is in its reach toward the ineffable.
Toni Morrison