Toni Morrison Quotes

Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.

As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.

Liberation means you don’t have to be silenced.

Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth.

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.

I’m always annoyed about why black people have to bear the brunt of everybody else’s contempt. If we are not totally understanding and smiling, suddenly we’re demons.

Everything I’ve ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.

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.

You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone.

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.

If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And white people have a very, very serious problem.

A lot of black people believe that Jews in this country have become white. They behave like white people rather than Jewish people.

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.

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.

A friend gathers all the pieces and gives them back in the right order.

Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich inherit it. I don’t mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network.

Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.