Quotes from Toni Morrison

I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me.

He dragged her under him and made love to her with the steadiness and the intensity of a man about to leave for Dayton.

back in the seventies, when women began to straddle chairs and dance crotch out on television, when all the magazines started featuring behinds and inner thighs as though that's all there is to a woman, well, I shut up altogether.

Because each had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph were forbidden to them, they had set about creating something else to be

I don't care what she is. Grown don't mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What's that supposed to mean? In my heart it don't mean a thing.

Well, if a man don't HAVE a chance, then he has to TAKE a chance!

Dear God... I, I have caused a miracle. I gave her the eyes. I gave her the blue, blue, two blue eyes. Cobalt blue. A streak of it right out of your own blue heaven. No one else will see her blue eyes. But she will. And she will live happily ever after.

Wait, wait, wait, wait. Don't try to write through it, to force it. Many do, but that won't work. Just wait, it will come.

The day breeze blew her dress dry; the night wind wrinkled it.

That all they want, man, is they own misery. Ax em to die for you and they yours for life.

But that might be unfair. It is hard not to notice how much more attention is given to hell rather than heaven. Dante's Inferno beats out Paradisio every time. Milton's brilliantly rendered pre-paradise world, known as Chaos, is far more fully realized than his Paradise. The visionary language of the doomed reaches heights of linguistic ardor with which language of the blessed and saved cannot compete.

It was as though he no longer needed to drink to forget whatever it was he could not remember. Now he could not remember that he had ever forgotten anything. Perhaps that was why for the first time after that old day in France he was beginning to miss the presence of other people. Shadrack had improved enough to feel lonely. If he was lonely before, he didn't know because the noise he kept up, the roaring, the busyness protected him from knowing it.