Quote

The best part of all, the absolutely most delicious part, is finishing it and then doing it over I rewrite a lot, over and over again, so that it looks like I never did.

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
Part
Best
Looks
Never
Like
Rewrite
Finishing
Delicious
Absolutely

More quotes by Toni Morrison

Image
I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer - its dust and lowering skies.
Toni Morrison
Image
I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me.
Toni Morrison
Image
Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.
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
The habit of getting up early, which I had formed when the children were young, now became my choice. I am not very bright or very witty or very inventive after the sun goes down.
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
Lonely, ain't it? Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else's. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain't that something? A secondhand lonely.
Toni Morrison
Image
Gimme hate, Lord,” he whimpered. “I’ll take hate any day. But don’t give me love. I can’t take no more love, Lord. I can’t carry it...It’s too heavy. Jesus, you know, you know all about it. Ain’t it heavy? Jesus? Ain’t love heavy?
Toni Morrison
Image
I know what every colored woman in this country is doing... Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I’m going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.
Toni Morrison
Image
All important things are hard.
Toni Morrison
Image
Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers - not the defined.
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
You been gone too long, Sula. Not too long, but maybe too far.
Toni Morrison
Image
Make up a story... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.
Toni Morrison
Image
Black women are the touchstone by which all that is human can be measured.
Toni Morrison
Image
Usually I try to be there by six. Everything has been taken off the walls so that there's nothing to arrest my sight. On the bed I have Roget's Thesaurus, a dictionary, a Bible, and a deck of playing cards.
Toni Morrison
Image
The seeds of destruction lie in the definition of chosen-ness and can easily blossom into bigotry. It's not inevitable but it needs constant care to avoid.
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
And wouldn't you know he'd be a singing man.
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