Tao Te Ching

The Power of Goodness, the Wisdom Beyond Words
Search Quotes Search Sages Search Chapters

Toni Morrison

(Chloe Ardelia Wofford)

1931 – 2019 CE

Story-telling voice of American wisdom

Novelist, professor, and essayist; Toni Morrison became Random House's first black woman editor. She consistently and insightfully addressed issues like race, feminism, white supremacy, and politics without fixating on extremes and while always keeping on open view. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Pulitzer, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Book Award, and she was chosen for the Jefferson Lecture—the U.S. government's highest honor for accomplishment in the humanities. President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom

Eras

Unlisted Sources

A Humanist View (1975)​

Beloved (1987)

Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)

Paradise (1997)​

Tar Baby (1981)​​

The Guardian

Quotes by Toni Morrison (17 quotes)

“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. No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to.”

from Tar Baby (1981)​​

Comments: Click to comment

“An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.”

from Tar Baby (1981)​​

Themes: Warriors Paradox

Comments: Click to comment

“Anger... it's a paralyzing emotion... you can't get anything done... — it's helpless, it's absence of control — it's not useful”

Themes: Anger

Comments: Click to comment

“In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.”

from The Guardian

Comments: Click to comment

“No one can blame the conqueror for writing history the way he sees it, and certainly not for digesting human events and discovering their patterns according to his own point of view. But it must be admitted … that conventional history supports and complements a very grave and almost pristine ignorance.”

from A Humanist View (1975)​

Comments: Click to comment

“Because the very nature of history is to make large distinctions, it encourages the intellect, therefore, to forgo finer ones... If such history continues to be the major informer of our sensibilities, we will remain functionally unintelligent.”

from A Humanist View (1975)​

Themes: History

Comments: Click to comment

“it is the ability to make distinctions—and the smaller the distinctions made, the higher the intellect that makes them—by which we judge intellect.”

from A Humanist View (1975)​

Comments: Click to comment

“We are the moral inhabitants of the globe. And to deny it is to lie in prison... And unless all races and all ages of man have been totally deluded, there seems to be such a thing as grace, such a thing as beauty, such a thing as harmony — all of which are wholly free, and available to us.”

from A Humanist View (1975)​

Comments: Click to comment

“to continue to see a race of people, any race of people as one single personality is an ignorance of gothic proportions, an ignorance so vast, so public, and perception so blind and so blunted, imagination so bleak that no nuance, no subtlety, no difference among them can be ascertained.”

from A Humanist View (1975​)

Comments: Click to comment

“Couples that enter the sacrament of marriage and are not prepared to go the distance or are not willing to get right with the real love of God cannot thrive. They may cleave together like robins or gulls or anything else that mates for life. But if they eschew this mighty course, at the moment when all are judged for the disposition of their eternal lives, their cleaving won't mean a thing.”

from Paradise (1997)​

Themes: Marriage

Comments: Click to comment

“Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God”

from Paradise (1997)​

Themes: Love

Comments: Click to comment

“Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.”

from Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)

Comments: Click to comment

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives... it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference — the way in which we are like no other life.”

from Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)

Comments: Click to comment

“Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.”

from Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)

Comments: Click to comment

“You don’t waste your energy fighting the fever; you must only fight the disease. And the disease is not racism. It is greed and the struggle for power.”

from A Humanist View (1975)​

Comments: Click to comment

“The concept of freedom did not emerge in a vacuum. Nothing highlighted freedom—if it did not fact create it—like slavery.”

from Beloved (1987)

Themes: Slavery Freedom

Comments: Click to comment

“What she called the nastiness of life was the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children.”

from Beloved (1987)

Comments: Click to comment

Quotes about Toni Morrison (2 quotes)

“Toni Morrison's prose brings us that kind of moral and emotional intensity that few writers ever attempt.”

Barack Obama 1961 CE –

Comments: Click to comment

“This writer enlarged the American imagination in ways we are only beginning to understand.”

Dwight Garner 1965 CE –
American Journalist

from New York Times​ article

Comments: Click to comment

Comments (0)