Quote

Black women are the touchstone by which all that is human can be measured.

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
Touchstone
Touchstones
Measured
Black
Women
Human
Humans

More quotes by Toni Morrison

Image
The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.
Toni Morrison
Image
Being able to laugh got me through.
Toni Morrison
Image
When you stiffen, you know that whatever you stiffen about is very important. The stuff is important, the fear itself is information.
Toni Morrison
Image
Did you ever see the way the clouds love a mountain? They circle all around it sometimes you can't even see the mountain for the clouds. But you know what? ... The clouds never cover the head. His head pokes through, because the clouds let him they don't wrap him up. They let him keep his head high, free.
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
And wouldn't you know he'd be a singing man.
Toni Morrison
Image
I know it's trash: just another story made up to scare wicked females and correct unruly children. But it's all I have. I know I need something else. Something better. Like a story that shows how brazen women can take a good man down. I can hum to that.
Toni Morrison
Image
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
Image
Something that is loved is never lost.
Toni Morrison
Image
Misery colored by the greens and blues in my mother's voice took away all the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet.
Toni Morrison
Image
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.
Toni Morrison
Image
If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down.
Toni Morrison
Image
An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.
Toni Morrison
Image
He wants to put his story next to hers.
Toni Morrison
Image
I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life.
Toni Morrison
Image
Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.
Toni Morrison
Image
I tell my students one of the most important things they need to know is when they are at their best, creatively. They need to ask themselves, What does the ideal room look like? Is there music? Is there silence? Is there chaos outside or is there serenity outside? What do I need in order to release my imagination?
Toni Morrison
Image
Much handled things are always soft(27).
Toni Morrison
Image
I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.
Toni Morrison
Image
Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It's not having no responsibilitie s it's choosing the ones you want.
Toni Morrison