Quotes from Toni Morrison

Make no mistake, the privatization of prisons is less about unburdening taxpayers than it is about providing bankrupt communities with sources of income and especially about providing corporations with a captured population available for unpaid labor.

some advice about how to keep on with a brain greedy for news nobody could live with in a world happy to provide it.

You know, the kind who know Jesus by His first name, but out of politeness never use it even to His face.

We will be judged by how well we love.

I am alarmed by the violence that women do to one another: professional violence, competitive violence, emotional violence. I am alarmed by the willingness of women to enslave other women. I am alarmed by a growing absence of decency on the killing floor of professional women's worlds.

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.

You are nothing but wilderness. No constraint. No mind. You shout the word—mind, mind, mind—over and over and then you laugh, saying as I live and breathe, a slave by choice.

What a man leaves behind is what a man is.

The sad thing was that Pauline did not really care for clothes and makeup. She merely wanted other women to cast favorable glances her way.

My nature is a quiet one, anyway. As a child I was considered respectful; as a young woman I was called discreet. Later on I was thought to have the wisdom maturity brings.

Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn't get interested in leaving life or living it.

Her heavy knives of defense against misery, regret, gall and hurt, she placed one by one on a bank where dear water rushed on below.