50+ Toni Morrison Quotes to Elevate Your Life

Why everyone should listen to Toni Morrison

Before digging into why one should listen to the timeless wisdom in Toni Morrison quotes, it’s important to understand the significance of motivational quotes in our culture and experience.

Motivational quotes have a way of inspiring us to action when our intrinsic desires aren’t up for the task. Research has shown that part of this has to do with the fact that simple, well-constructed phrases are simply easier to remember. Use of literary devices such as rhyme, metaphor, and parallelism make ideas more memorable and therefore “stickier.”

Importantly, motivational quotes also provide a shorthand for communicating broad and sometimes universal truths about various aspects of the human experience.

Throughout history, countless quotes have been crafted and passed down through generations. It should stand to reason that many of the most inspiring quotes were originated by those rare writers and orators gifted with the ability to describe the indescribable.

It should be no surprise, then, that in her life, the late Toni Morrison (1931-2019) left a legacy of powerfully stated truths from which we can all benefit. Morrison was a titan of American literature, articulated the arresting and all too often crushing experience of being a black woman in America. As The New York Times cites in her obituary, published August 6, 2019, she was one of the rare writers to receive both critical and commercial success during her lifetime:

The first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1993, Ms. Morrison was the author of 11 novels as well as children’s books and essay collections. Among them were celebrated works like “Song of Solomon,” which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977, and “Beloved,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988.

Reading her novels, there is simply no denying the authenticity in Ms. Morrison’s lyrical prose. She possessed an ability to connect language with feeling that was unmatched by her contemporaries.

One doesn’t need to look much farther than the evening news to know that now, perhaps more than ever, many of us are deeply struggling. Struggle is something to which Ms. Morrison — born to a black, working class family in Ohio in the 1930s — is no stranger. While our struggles may differ dramatically, her mastery of language allows her to transcend experience and connect with feelings that are universal.

To that end, I’ve curated more than 50 of what I believe to be Ms. Morrison’s most salient quotes, especially at a time like this.

Toni Morrison quotes

Toni Morrison quotes about life

1. Your life is already artful — waiting, just waiting for you to make it art.
2. The function of freedom is to free someone else.
3. Lonely, ain’t it? Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else’s. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain’t that something? A secondhand lonely.
4. Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.
5. Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.
6. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.
7. I dream a dream that dreams back at me.
8. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
9. You are your best thing.
10. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours, forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light.
11. Liberation means you don’t have to be silenced.
12. There is no civilization that did not begin with art, Whether it was drawing a line in the sand, painting a cave or dancing.
13. Anything dead coming back to life hurts.
14. To be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing.

Toni Morrison quotes about writing

15. 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.
16. I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can’t do anything anyway.
17. Writing is really a way of thinking — not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.
18. I tell my students one of the most important things they need to know when they are their best, creatively. They need to ask themselves: What does the ideal room look like? Is there music? Is there silence? Is there chaos outside or is there serenity outside?
19. I feel like today we always glorify the young, just-plucked-from-college writer. But it’s much harder to start writing later, in middle age, struggling on a book around a full-time job and family.
20. One has to work very carefully with what is in between the words. What is not said. Which is measure, which is rhythm and so on. So, it is what you don’t write that frequently gives what you do write its power.
21. Intimacy is extremely important to me and I want it to be extremely important to the readers.
22. I write the way women have babies. You don’t know it’s going to be like that. If you did, there’s no way you would go through with it.
23. The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.
24. I can’t explain inspiration. A writer is either compelled to write or not. And if I waited for inspiration I wouldn’t really be a writer.
25. I type in one place, but I write all over the house.

Toni Morrison quotes about love

26. Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.
27. And I am all the things I have ever loved: scuppernong wine, cool baptisms in silent water, dream books and number playing.
28. 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. When that happens — that letting go — you let go because you can.
29. She is a friend of my mind. She gathered me, man. The pieces I am, she gathered them and gave them back to me in all the right order.
30. Something that is loved is never lost.
31. Love is divine only and difficult always.
32. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that? Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door? You don’t, do you?
33. Don’t think I ever fell for you, or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love; I rose in it.

Toni Morrison quotes about education

34. Not knowing it was hard; knowing it was harder.
35. No matter how hard we try to ignore it, the mind always knows truth and wants clarity.
36. Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.

Toni Morrison quotes about motivation

37. I get angry about things, then go on and work.
38. If you wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.
39. If you surrender to the wind, you can ride it.
40. Make a difference about something other than yourself.
41. As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.
42. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
    

Toni Morrison quotes about race

43. In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.
44. No one ever talks about the moment you found that you were white. Or the moment you found out you were black. That’s a profound revelation. The minute you find that out, something happens. You have to renegotiate everything.
45. 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.
46. I sold my elegant blackness to all those childhood ghosts and now they pay me for it.
47. The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.
48. Racism is a construct, a social construct… but ‘race’ can only be defined as a human being.
49. Racism will disappear when it’s no longer profitable, and no longer psychologically useful. And when that happens, it’ll be gone. But at the moment, people make a lot of money off of it, pro and con.
50. Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.
    

Toni Morrison quotes about women

51. 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.
52. Womanists is what black feminists used to call themselves. Very much so. They were not the same thing. And also the relationship with men. Historically, black women have always sheltered their men because they were out there, and they were the ones that were most likely to be killed.
53. Black women have always been friends. I mean, if you didn’t have each other you had nothing.