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
Beauty was not simply something to behold it was something one could do.
Toni Morrison
Image
Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.
Toni Morrison
Image
This word LOVE - discredited, clicheed - can be restored and love, the instinct, the impulse to care for somebody in the hope that somebody will care for you - plus our language, the language, a language - is about all we have. With everything else going on, this is what makes us, what keeps us human.
Toni Morrison
Image
Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another - physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.
Toni Morrison
Image
Love it, love it and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.
Toni Morrison
Image
Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.
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
Anything dead coming back to life hurts.
Toni Morrison
Image
Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? The Lion or the Mouse? Poppy or the Snake?
Toni Morrison
Image
Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs—all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured
Toni Morrison
Image
When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.
Toni Morrison
Image
Books ARE a form of political action. Books are knowledge. Books are reflection. Books change your mind.
Toni Morrison
Image
When a child walks in the room, your child or anybody else’s child, do your eyes light up? That’s what they’re looking for.
Toni Morrison
Image
Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.
Toni Morrison
Image
I don't think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It's perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man.
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
There's a difference between writing for a living and writing for life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises.... If you write for life, you'll work hard you'll do what's honest, not what pays
Toni Morrison
Image
Her mind traveled crooked streets and aimless goat paths, arriving sometimes at profundity, other times at the revelations of a three-year-old. Throughout this fresh, if common, pursuit of knowledge, one conviction crowned her efforts: ...she knew there was nothing to fear.
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
Image
My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren't my children.
Toni Morrison