Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Ought
Respect
Blocked
Write
Block
Tell
Shouldn
Right
Havens
Writing
Haven
Thing
Students
Writer
More quotes by Toni Morrison
The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.
Toni Morrison
Writing is really a way of thinking--not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.
Toni Morrison
Anything dead coming back to life hurts.
Toni Morrison
Black women are the touchstone by which all that is human can be measured.
Toni Morrison
Race is the least reliable information you can have about someone. It's real information, but it tells you next to nothing.
Toni Morrison
Books ARE a form of political action. Books are knowledge. Books are reflection. Books change your mind.
Toni Morrison
Unless carefree, mother love was a killer.
Toni Morrison
The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one.
Toni Morrison
Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? The Lion or the Mouse? Poppy or the Snake?
Toni Morrison
guileless and without vanity,we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our own skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness.
Toni Morrison
Whatever happens, whether you get rich or stay poor, ruin your health or live to old age, you always end up back where you started: hungry for the one thing everybody loses - young loving.
Toni Morrison
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.
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. No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens — that letting go — you let go because you can.
Toni Morrison
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
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. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.
Toni Morrison
I'm just trying to look at something without blinking, to see what it is like, or it could have been like, and how that had something to do with the way we live now. Novels are always inquiries for me.
Toni Morrison
Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It's not having no responsibilitie s it's choosing the ones you want.
Toni Morrison
Sweet, she thought. He must think I can't bear to hear him say it. That after all I have told him and after telling me how many feet I have, goodbye would break me to pieces. Ain't that sweet. So long, she murmured from the far side of the trees.
Toni Morrison
What's the world for you if you can't make it up the way you want it?
Toni Morrison
My father saw two black men lynched on his street in Cartersville, as a child. And I think seeing two black businessmen - not vagrants - hanging from trees as a child was traumatic for him.
Toni Morrison