Toni Morrison – 17 Quotes

17 Quotes by Toni Morrison

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

– Toni Morrison

Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.

– 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

There is nothing of any consequence in education, in the economy, in city planning, in social policy that does not concern black people.

– Toni Morrison

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.

– Toni Morrison

I don’t think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It’s perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man.

– Toni Morrison

She is a friend of 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.

– Toni Morrison

I like marriage. The idea.

– Toni Morrison

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.

– Toni Morrison

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.

– Toni Morrison

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

– Toni Morrison

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.

– Toni Morrison

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

– Toni Morrison

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.

– Toni Morrison

It’s been mentioned or suggested that Paradise will not be well studied, because it’s about this unimportant intellectual topic, which is religion.

– Toni Morrison

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

– Toni Morrison

I merged those two words, black and feminist, because I was surrounded by black women who were very tough and and who always assumed they had to work and rear children and manage homes.

– Toni Morrison