Toni Morrison was a trailblazing author who not only changed the landscape of American Literature but the landscape of America. She was the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. She will be sorely missed but fortunately, we have her words forever. Here are 20 powerful quotes by Ms. Morisson.
20. "Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another."
19. "You wanna fly, you got to give up the thing that weighs you down."
18. "If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.
17. "Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all."
16. "And I am all the things I have ever loved: scuppernong wine, cool baptisms in silent water, dream books and number playing."
15. "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 – I have no use for it whatsoever."
14. “The function of freedom is to free someone else.”
13. "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?"
12. "You can’t own a human being. You can’t lose what you don’t own"
11. "Did you ever see the way the clouds love a mountain? They circle all around it; sometimes you can’t even see the mountain for the clouds. But you know what? You go up top and what do you see? His head. The clouds never cover the head. His head pokes through, because the clouds let him; they don’t wrap him up. They let him keep his head up high, free, with nothing to hide him or bind him"
10. "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."
9. "Don’t ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it."
8. "Anything dead coming back to life hurts."
7. "Let me tell you something. A man ain’t a goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can’t chop down because they’re inside"
6. "To get to a place where you could love anything you chose – not to need permission for desire – well now that was freedom."
5. "I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it."
4." I tell my students, ‘When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game."
3. "It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you."
2. "Writing is really a way of thinking – not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet."
1." Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined."
Rest In Power Toni Morrison
2/18/1931- Infinity
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