Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Toni Morrison (American Novelist)

Toni Morrison (1931–2019) was an American writer whose fiction and nonfiction explored the African-American experience. One of the most significant authors of contemporary American literature, she was the first African-American woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature (1993.) Over a five-decade career, Morrison wrote 11 novels, a libretto, and collections of nonfiction, and worked as an editor helping develop a “canon of black work.”

Born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison grew up during the Depression in a steel town near Cleveland. She started writing when she was in her thirties and unhappily married. After her divorce, she began work as an editor, and, after putting her children to bed in the evenings, wrote as a means of staying in touch with her roots when she “had no one to talk to.” Her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970,) offered a powerful critique of the way that black subjectivity continues to be repressed. It featured a black teenage girl who is infatuated with white standards and yearns to have blue eyes.

Morrison’s first big success was the novel Song of Solomon (1977) about a wealthy black businessman who tries to conceal his working-class background. Her best known novel, Beloved (1987; film starring Oprah Winfrey, 1998; Pulitzer, 1988,) was based on a true story of a post-Civil War escapee slave who, after she is recaptured, kills her infant daughter to release her from slavery and oppression.

Even though Morrison is known primarily for her novels, she was also prolific in the areas of nonfiction and literary criticism. Her work was frequently featured on all the major best-seller lists. Her exploration of race, gender, and identity is increasingly taught on American college campuses.

The biopic Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am (2019) celebrated Morrison’s literary and cultural importance.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Toni Morrison

Grown don’t mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What’s that suppose to mean? In my heart it don’t mean a thing.
—Toni Morrison
Topics: Mothers

If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.
—Toni Morrison

For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction.
—Toni Morrison

Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.
—Toni Morrison

When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.
—Toni Morrison
Topics: Pain

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
Topics: Friendship

If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.
—Toni Morrison
Topics: Writing, Book, Books

There is really nothing more to say except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.
—Toni Morrison
Topics: Reason

Birth, life, and death—each took place on the hidden side of a leaf.
—Toni Morrison
Topics: Life

How soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like forever. As though there never was a time when they didn’t love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves.
—Toni Morrison
Topics: City Life, Cities, Country

All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.
—Toni Morrison

Wondering Whom to Read Next?

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *