Toni Morrison Quotes

“I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don't know why I should be asked to explain your life to you. We have splendid writers to do that, but I am not one of them. It is that business of being universal, a word hopelessly stripped of meaning for me. Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. That's what I wish to do. If I tried to write a universal novel, it would be water. Behind this question is the suggestion that to write for black people is somehow to diminish the writing. From my perspective there are only black people. When I say 'people,' that's what I mean.”
― Toni Morrison

“Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“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. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind."

Sixo”
― Toni Morrison

“I laughed but before I could agree with the hairdressers that she was crazy, she said, 'What's the world for if you can't make it up the way you want it?'

" 'The way I want it?'

" 'Yeah. The way you want it. Don't you want it to be something more than what it is?'

" 'What'st eh point? I can't change it.'

" 'That's the point. If you don't, it will change you and it'll be your fault cause you let it. I let it. And messed up my life.'

" 'Mess it up how?'

" 'Forgot it.'

" 'Forgot?'

" 'Forgot it was mine. My life. I just ran up and down the streets wishing I was somebody else.”
― Toni Morrison, Jazz

“It's gonna hurt, now," said Amy. "anything dead coming back to life hurts.”
― Toni Morrison

“If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.- Toni Morrison”
― Sean Liburd

“No gasp at a miracle that is truly miraculous because the magic lies in the fact that you knew it was there for you all along.”
― Toni Morrison

“Nobody loved her and she wouldn’t have liked it if they had, she considered love a serious disability.”
― Toni Morrison

“Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn't get interested in leaving life or living it, let alone the fright of two creeping-off boys. Her past had been like her present—intolerable—and since she knew death was anything but forgetfulness, she used the little energy left her for pondering color.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Mister was allowed to be and stay what he was. But I wasn't allowed to be and stay what I was [...] School teacher changed me. I was something else and that something else was less than a chicken sitting in the sun on a tub. (Paul D.)”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Her heart kicked and an itchy burning in her throat made her swallow all her saliva away. She didn't know which way to go.”
― Toni Morrison

“When I first seed Cholly, I want you to know it was like all the bits of color from that time down home when all us chil'ren went berry picking after a funeral and I put some in the pocket of my Sunday dress, and they mashed up and stained my hips. My whole dress was messed with purple, and it never did wash out. Not the dress nor me. I could feel that purple deep inside me. And that lemonade Mama used to make when Pap came in out the fields. It be cool and yellowish, with seeds floating near the bottom. And that streak of green them june bugs made on the trees the night we left from down home. All of them colors was in me. Just sitting there. So when Cholly come up and tickled my foot, it was like them berries, that lemonade, them streaks of green the june bugs made, all come together. Cholly was thin then, with real light eyes. He used to whistle, and when I heerd him, shivers come on my skin.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“Well, it probably won't live. They say the way her mama beat her she lucky to be alive herself.

She be lucky if it don't live. Bound to be the ugliest thing walking.

Can't help but be. Ought to be a law: two ugly people doubling up like that to make more ugly. Be better off in the ground.

Well, I wouldn't worry none. It be a miracle if it live.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“Toni Morrison’s sentences were like rivers with murky bottoms. They didn’t obey the rules I was learning in school. When I stepped in, I couldn’t see my feet; I retreated back to the shore.”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives

“Carefully they replaced the soil and covered the entire grave with uprooted grass.
Neither one had spoken a word.”
― Toni Morrison, Sula

“Joy situates every emotion within itself. It grounds them so that one isn’t overindulged while the others lie starving. Joy doesn’t replace any emotion; it holds them all and keeps them from swallowing us whole. Society has failed to understand this. When it tells us to find joy in suffering, it is telling us to let it go, to move on, to smile through it. But joy says, Hold on to your sorrow. It can rest safely here.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

“What is the worth of a woman plagued by sadness?
When people demand joy always, it makes the world seem incompatible with those of us whose happiest days are still anguished. In this way, joy was one of my earliest alienators.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

“You may think we are called to holy things that involve praying on your knees and going to church, and maybe we are.
But I haven't known God to regulate holiness. I think they injected it into every bit of everything. And I imagine they are very concerned with every element of life, including our work.
And why wouldn't they be?”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

“We train our focus on beauty here or there—this poem, that architecture—because it is easier than bearing witness to our own story. We begin to gravitate not toward beauty but toward illusion. In this state, you are not approaching what you seek. You are running from your own face. But this is not the way of wonder. Wonder requires a person not to forget themselves but to feel themselves so acutely that their connectedness to every created thing comes into focus. In sacred awe, we are a part of the story.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

“Practicing wonder is a powerful tool against despair. It works nearly the same muscles as hope, in that you find yourself believing in goodness and beauty even when the evidence gives you every reason to believe that goodness and beauty are void. This can feel like a risk to those of us who have had our dreams colonized, who have known the devastation of hope unfulfilled. I once heard the Japanese artist Makoto Fujimura say, "The most courageous thing we can do as a people is to behold." This gave me great empathy for those who have lost their wonder. For myself. We are not to blame for what the world has so relentlessly tried to crush in us, but we are endangered because of it.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

“To be a human who resembles the divine is to become responsible for the beautiful, for its observance, its protection, and its creation. It is a challenge to believe that this right is ours.
Wonder, then, is a force of liberation. It makes sense of what our souls inherently know we were meant for. Every mundane glimpse is salve on a wound, instructions for how to set the bone right again. If you really want to get free, find God on the subway. Find God in the soap bubble.
Me? I meet God in the taste of my gramma's chicken. I hear God in the raspy leather of Nina Simone's voice. I see the face of God in the bony teenager bagging my groceries. And why shouldn't I? My faith is held together by wonder—by every defiant commitment to presence and paying attention. I cannot tell you with precision what makes the sun set, but I can tell you how those colors, blurred together, calm my head and change my breath. I will die knowing I lived a faith that changed my breathing. A faith that made me believe I could see air.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

“Collective memory requires that we piece together the fragments of individual memory and behold something not necessarily larger but with greater depth and colour. I think the whole Bible is predicated on collective remembrance. You have feast and fast days, storytelling, and most conspicuously, the Eucharist. A shared table and a shared loaf. Take, eat, drink. The Christian story hinges on a ceremony of communal remembrance. This should train us toward an embodied memory. My hand on a ballet barre, and every muscle knows how to come awake again. My father takes up my detangled hair in his hands, and his fingers dip and twist so fast they blur and become one. Do this in remembrance of me.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

“Some theologies say it is not an individual but a collective people who bear the image of God. I quite like this, because it means we need a diversity of people to reflect God more fully.
Anything less and the image becomes pixelated and grainy, still beautiful but lacking clarity. If God really is three parts in one like they say, it means that God's wholeness is in a multitude.
I do not know if God meant to confer value on us by creating us in their own image, but they had to have known it would at least be one outcome. How can anyone who is made to bear likeness to the maker of the cosmos be anything less than glory? This is inherent dignity.
I do find it peculiar that humans have come to wield this over the rest of creation as though we are somehow superior. I don't believe this to be the case. Sometimes I wonder if we knelt down and put our ear to the ground, it would whisper up to us, Yes, you were made in the image of God, but God made you of me. We've grown numb to the idea that we ourselves are made of the dust, mysteriously connected to the goodness of the creation that surrounds us.
Perhaps the more superior we believe ourselves to be to creation, the less like God we become. But if we embrace shalom—the idea that everything is suspended in a delicate balance between the atoms that make me and the tree and the bird and the sky—if we embrace the beauty of all creation, we find our own beauty magnified. And what is shalom but dignity stretched out like a blanket over the cosmos?”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

“How will we make space to hold the memory of the collective? There are times when belonging is not cemented in the lived moment of an experience but in the lively or sombre retelling of the moment afterward. Which means we can transfer belonging to the next generation by welcoming them into memories that they (or we) have not lived but choose to steward. In many spaces, to foster collective memory well, we must habitually ask ourselves, Whose story gets told, whose story is believed, and who gets to tell it? If we surrender our individual egos, these questions can function as a pruning process, as we contend with accounts that don’t line up quite flush. This interrogation may reveal false memories.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

“Sometimes, it is only in the hands of another that a memory can be fully encountered. All of a sudden it is not the front of the car you see but the street from the back side window. The memory expands past two dimensions. This is the beauty of collective memory.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

“I once heard that joy and happiness do different things to the body. Happiness, which works itself out in the sympathetic nervous system, makes you excitable and energetic. It's important but fleeting, grounded in the immediacy of a moment or the whim of a feeling. Joy is more tranquil. It has to do with the parasympathetic nervous system, and it's much more about peace than vibrancy.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

“Liberation loves company. It is not threatened by another person's identity, because liberation is not a scarcity. It can only affirm itself in another person.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

“Memory is frail. It requires a delicate touch, a tenderness.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

“I once heard the activist John Perkins say, “You don’t give dignity, you affirm it.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

“When we grow accustomed to neglecting beauty, we eventually become creatures of hatred. We lose? our imagination—a virtue to which wonder is helplessly tied.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us