Toni Morrison Quotes.
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.
If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.
In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.
My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren’t my children.
Women’s rights is not only an abstraction, a cause; it is also a personal affair. It is not only about us; it is also about me and you. Just the two of us.
The body is ready to have babies. Nature wants it done then, when the body can handle it, not after 40, when the income can handle it.
A lot of black people believe that Jews in this country have become white. They behave like white people rather than Jewish people.
Make a difference about something other than yourselves.
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.
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
The unflattering reviews are painful for short periods of time; the badly written ones are deeply, deeply insulting. That reviewer took no time to really read the book.
I don’t think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they’re black or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money. That’s what we’re upset about.
I get angry about things, then go on and work.
The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one.
Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
A friend gathers all the pieces and gives them back in the right order.
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.
