Toni Morrison

Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.

Each member of the family in his own cell of consciousness, each making his own patchwork quilt of reality - collecting fragments of experience here, pieces of information there. From the tiny impressions gleaned from one another, they created a sense of belonging and tried to make do with the way they found each other.

There in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning.

Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.

I know that my books are worthy, which is separate from me.

Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

When a child walks in the room, your child or anybody else’s child, do your eyes light up? That’s what they’re looking for.

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

I am a writer and my faith in the world of art is intense, but not irrational, nor naïve - because art takes us and makes us take a journey beyond price, beyond cost, into bearing witness to the world as it is and as it should be. Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

I don't believe any real artists have ever been non-political. They may have been insensitive to this particular plight or insensitive to that, but they were political, because that's what an artist is-a politician.

There is no civilization that did not begin with art, Whether it was drawing a line in the sand, painting a cave or dancing.

Let your face speak what's in your heart.

My first-born. All I can remember of her is how she loved the burned bottom of bread. Can you beat that? Eight children and that's all I remember.

Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?

And they beat. The women for having known them and no more, no more; the children for having been them but never again. They killed a boss so often and so completely they had to bring him back to life to pulp him one more time. Tasting hot mealcake among pine trees, they beat it away. Singing love songs to Mr. Death, they smashed his head. More than the rest, they killed the flirt whom folks called Life for leading them on.

Love just seems to make life not just livable, but a gallant, gallant event.

When you know your name, you should hang on to it, for unless it is noted down and remembered, it will die when you do.

You your own best thing, Sethe. You are.

I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway.

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.

The unflattering reviews are painful for short periods of time; the badly written ones are deeply, deeply insulting. That reviewer took no time to really read the book.