Toni Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford) was an American novelist, essayist, editor, teacher, and professor emeritus at Princeton University. Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award in 1988 for Beloved (1987). The novel was adapted into a film of the same name (starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover) in 1998. Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. In 1996, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected her for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government’s highest honor for achievement in the humanities.
She was honored with the 1996 National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Morrison wrote the libretto for a new opera, Margaret Garner, first performed in 2005. On May 29, 2012, President Barack Obama presented Morrison with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2016, she received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.
Some of the best quotes from Toni Morrison are listed below.
- “All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.” – Toni Morrison
- “Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another – physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought.” – Toni Morrison
- “And I am all the things I have ever loved: scuppernong wine, cool baptisms in silent water, dream books and number playing.” – Toni Morrison
- “Anger…it’s a paralyzing emotion…you can’t get anything done. People sort of think it’s an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling — I don’t think it’s any of that — it’s helpless…” – 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
- “Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.” – Toni Morrison
- “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?” – Toni Morrison
- “Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.” – Toni Morrison
- “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, because 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.” – 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
- “Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul.” – Toni Morrison
- “Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.” – Toni Morrison
- “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. ‘” – Toni Morrison
- “I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.” – 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 surrendered to the air, you could ride it.” – 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
- “Let me tell you something. A man ain’t a goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can’t chop down because they’re inside.” – Toni Morrison
- “Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind.” – Toni Morrison
- “Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe.” – Toni Morrison
- “Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.” – Toni Morrison
- “Make up a story…For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light.” – Toni Morrison
- “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.” – Toni Morrison
- “Some things you forget. Other things you never do.” – Toni Morrison
- “Something that is loved is never lost.” – Toni Morrison
- “The function of freedom is to free someone else.” – Toni Morrison
- “The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.” – Toni Morrison
- “There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship’s, smooths and contains the rocker. It’s an inside kind–wrapped tight like skin.” – Toni Morrison
- “To get to a place where you could love anything you chose – not to need permission for desire – well now that was freedom.” – 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’s the world for you if you can’t make it up the way you want it?” – Toni Morrison
- “Writing is really a way of thinking – not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.” – Toni Morrison
- “You are your best thing.” – Toni Morrison
- “You can’t own a human being. You can’t lose what you don’t own.” – Toni Morrison
- “You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.” – Toni Morrison
- “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.” – Toni Morrison
