Toni Morrison quotes

The function of freedom is to free someone else.

You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.

Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.

If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.

At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough.

You don’t have to love me but you damn well have to respect me.

Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.

Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.

If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down.

In this country, American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.

The function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work.

Make a difference about something other than yourselves.

Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence.

I’m trying to make a picture of the world as I see it, not how it should look.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.

If you can’t imagine it, you can’t have it.

Silence is never Golden. It’s yellow.

You are your best thing.

I get angry about things, then go on and work.

If you want to fly, you must give up the things that weigh you down.

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

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.

Anger… it’s a paralyzing emotion… you can’t get anything done. People sorta think it’s an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling. I don’t think it’s any of that… it’s helpless… it’s absence of control… I have no use for it whatsoever.

Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.

The concept of race is not just powerful, it is literally fantastic. It disturbs not just institutions, but reality itself.

It’s been said that racism is so American, that when we protest racism, some assume we are protesting America.

It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.

People who can’t escape their past have no future.

Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.

The very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.

The function, the very serious function of racism, is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being.

There is really nothing more to say-except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.

Rememory is when you have a memory that belongs to someone else.

You protected white women with your bodies, but you forgot to protect me.

You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.

She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.

Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly.

If you looked at it that way, you could say that my cure was found in yet another poison… a perfect contradiction of life.

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.

You can’t own a human being. You can’t lose what you don’t own.

I’m a believer in the American dream… but that dream is hidden in a nightmare.

You think because he doesn’t love you that you are worthless. You think that because he doesn’t want you anymore that he is right — that his judgement and opinion of you are correct. If he throws you out, then you are garbage. You think he belongs to you because you want to belong to him. Don’t. It’s a bad word, ‘belong.’ Especially when you put it with somebody you love. Love shouldn’t be like that. 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? You go up top and what do you see? His head. The clouds never cover the head. His head pokes through, beacuse the clouds let him; they don’t wrap him up. They let him keep his head up high, free, with nothing to hide him or bind him. You can’t own a human being. You can’t lose what you don’t own. Suppose you did own him. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that? Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door? You don’t, do you? And neither does he. You’re turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can’t value you more than you value yourself.