Chloe Ardelia Wofford, or Toni Morrison, as she is generally known, is an American novelist and professor, born in 1931. Morrison, has not only been awarded with the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award, but she has also received the Nobel Prize and a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Some of her most notable works include: Beloved, Song of Solomon and The Bluest Eye.
1.“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”
2.“You do not deserve love regardless of the suffering you have endured. You do not deserve love because somebody did you wrong. You do not deserve love just because you want it. You can only earn – by practice and careful contemplations – the right to express it and you have to learn how to accept it.”
3.“It was a fine cry – loud and long – but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.”
4. “You’re turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can’t value you more than you value yourself.”
5.“Love is never any better than the lover. ”
6.“Anger … it’s a paralyzing emotion … you can’t get anything done. People sort of think it’s an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling — I don’t think it’s any of that — it’s helpless … it’s absence of control — and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers … and anger doesn’t provide any of that — I have no use for it whatsoever.”
7.“It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.”
8.“There is really nothing more to say – except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.”
9. “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.”
10.“Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.”
11.“As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.”
12. “What’s the world for you if you can’t make it up the way you want it?”
13.“Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.
14.“Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings, had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like an artist with no art form, she became dangerous.”
15. “Lonely was much better than alone.”
16. “It’s a bad word, ‘belong.’ Especially when you put it with somebody you love … You can’t own a human being.”
17.“A dream is just a nightmare with lipstick.”
18. “Don’t ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it.”
19.“All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.”
20.“Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.”
21.“I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don’t know why I should be asked to explain your life to you … If I tried to write a universal novel, it would be water.”
22.“What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.”
23.“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.”
