A lot of black people believe that Jews in this country have become white. They behave like white people rather than Jewish people.
Toni Morrison

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

Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.
Toni Morrison

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

Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.
Toni Morrison

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

Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.
Toni Morrison


Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth.
Toni Morrison

For a long time I was convinced that the conflict between Jewish people and black people in this country was a media event.
Toni Morrison

Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
Toni Morrison

I always looked upon the acts of racist exclusion, or insult, as pitiable, from the other person. I never absorbed that. I always thought that there was something deficient about such people.
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

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

I get angry about things, then go on and work.
Toni Morrison

I like marriage. The idea.
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

I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can't teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort.
Toni Morrison