Make a difference about something
other than yourselves.
Quotation of Toni Morrison
To dine more at Wisdom’s Buffet with Toni Morrison, keep reading…
MORE FROM WISDOM’S BUFFET & TONI MORRISON:
| All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think. Quotation of 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. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| Becoming an American is based on an attitude: an exclusion of me. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form. Quotation of 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. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| Every now and then I’d see a black woman reviewer take another black woman writer, a critic usually, but usually it’s in that field of cultural criticism. Quotation of 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. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| Everything I’ve ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth. Quotation of 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. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another. Quotation of 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. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| I am on serious business now. This is not girl playing. This is not wife playing. I am the head of a household, and I must work to pay for my children. Quotation of 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. Quotation of 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. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| I don’t write -ist novels. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| I get angry about things, then go on and work. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| I guess it comes with being over 64, you just get sort of melancholy. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| I know the value of a good editor. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| I learned a lot in marriage, in divorce. I think women do. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| I learned an enormous amount of self-esteem, even though the collapse of the relationship suggested the opposite. I just had to stand up. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| I like marriage. The idea. Quotation of 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. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| I never, never, ever spoke ill of their father. I didn’t want to put that burden on them. I didn’t want them to choose. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| I really have very few friends who are writers. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| I regard them all that way, all those books I’ve written. Years later, I read them, or read them in public. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| I stole away from the world. Very, very early in the morning, I’m not very good at night. I don’t generate much. Quotation of 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. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| I used to complain bitterly that psychiatry never considered race. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| I want to go to Senegal. And now, South Africa. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| I would imagine there would be some difference of opinion on what the book is like or what it meant. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can’t do anything anyway. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| I write by hand. I had all my manuscripts, notes from old books, in my bedroom on the second floor. The fire took them. But I know I would never look at that stuff again. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| I’m always annoyed about why black people have to bear the brunt of everybody else’s contempt. If we are not totally understanding and smiling, suddenly we’re demons. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| I’m not entangled in shaping my work according to other people’s views of how I should have done it. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| I’m very brutal. I just tell them: You have to do this, I don’t want to hear whining about how it’s so difficult. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| I’m very much interested in how African-American literature is perceived in this country, and written about, and viewed. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| I’ve lost the anger now. I’m feeling really sad. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| If I had raised them earlier or later, I would have said, This is what you do. You don’t live in that neighborhood. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| If you’re going to hold someone down you’re going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| In any of those Southern writers, there’s the moment when black and white children play together, and then there’s a moment when that’s all over, because they can’t socialize together. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it’s nothing else but color. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| In the New Yorker, the reviewer spent a lot of time talking about Bill Cosby’s television show-the kind of black family to be compared with the family in Beloved. It was so revolting. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| It makes me breathless to be told that this is difficult writing-that nobody in the schools is going to want to talk about all of these issues. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| It never occurred to me that that was feminist activity. My mother would walk down to a theater to make sure that they were not segregating the population. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| It was a very strong interior life that I developed for the characters, and for myself, because something was always churning. There was no blank time. Quotation of 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. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| Make a difference about something other than yourselves. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| Most of the people who’ve ever written are under enormous duress, myself being one them. So whining about how they can’t get it is ridiculous. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren’t my children. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
| Nelson Mandela is, for me, the single statesman in the world. The single statesman, in that literal sense, who is not solving all his problems with guns. It’s truly unbelievable. Quotation of Toni Morrison |
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