A dream is just a nightmare with lipstick.
--Toni Morrison
All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.
--Toni Morrison
All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.
--Toni Morrison
Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.
--Toni Morrison
Anything dead coming back to life hurts.
--Toni Morrison
As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.
--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.
--Toni Morrison
Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.
--Toni Morrison
Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.
--Toni Morrison
Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
--Toni Morrison
If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.
--Toni Morrison
If you surrender to the wind you can ride it.
--Toni Morrison
If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.
--Toni Morrison
In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.
--Toni Morrison
It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.
--Toni Morrison
Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.
--Toni Morrison
Lonely was much better than alone.
--Toni Morrison
Love is never any better than the lover.
--Toni Morrison
Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.
--Toni Morrison
Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try.
--Toni Morrison
Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it's not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place- the picture of it- stays, and not just in my remory, but out there, in the world.
--Toni Morrison
Something that is loved is never lost.
--Toni Morrison
There is really nothing more to say- except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.
--Toni Morrison
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
--Toni Morrison
What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?
--Toni Morrison
What does the term 'anti-American' mean? Does it mean you are anti-jazz? Or that you're opposed to freedom of speech? That you don't delight in Toni Morrison or John Updike? That you have a quarrel with giant sequoias? Does it mean that you don't admire the hundreds of thousands of American citizens who marched against nuclear weapons, or the thousands of war resisters who forced their government to withdraw from Vietnam? Does it mean that you hate all Americans?
--Arundhati Roy
What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.
--Toni Morrison
You are an adult. The old one, the wise one. Stop thinking about saving your face. Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world.
--Toni Morrison
You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.
--Toni Morrison
Found 29 occurence(s) in 52,537 quotation(s).