Toni Morrison

African American novelist, essayist, and academic

Toni Morrison was an acclaimed American novelist and editor who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. Her works addressed the harsh consequences of racism in the United States and the Black American experience. Some of her most famous novels include The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and Beloved.

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About the Toni Morrison

Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrisonbrought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.

Born and raised in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a B.A. in English. Morrison earned a master’s degree in American Literature from Cornell University in 1955. In 1957 she returned to Howard University, was married, and had two children before divorcing in 1964. Morrison became the first black female editor in fiction at Random House in New York City in the late 1960s. She developed her own reputation as an author in the 1970s and ’80s. Her novel Beloved was made into a film in 1998. Morrison’s works are praised for addressing the harsh consequences of racism in the United States and the Black American experience.

The National Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government’s highest honor for achievement in the humanities, in 1996. She was honored with the National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters the same year. President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on May 29, 2012. She received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2016. Morrison was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2020.

Frequently Asked Questions

Toni Morrison’s full name was Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, née Chloe Ardelia Wofford.

Toni Morrison was born on February 18, 1931, and she passed away on August 5, 2019.

Toni Morrison’s critically acclaimed novels include The Bluest Eye (1970), Song of Solomon (1977), and Beloved (1987).

Toni Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 for her novel Beloved, and she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.

Toni Morrison was born and raised in Lorain, Ohio.

Toni Morrison graduated from Howard University with a B.A. in English, and she earned a master’s degree in American Literature from Cornell University. She later became the first black female editor in fiction at Random House in New York City.

Toni Morrison’s works were praised for addressing the harsh consequences of racism in the United States and the Black American experience.

51 Quotes by Toni Morrison

  1. 1.

    All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  2. 2.

    You marvel at the economy and this choice of words. How many ways can you describe the sky and the moon? After Sylvia Plath, what can you say?

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  3. 3.

    Make a difference about something other than yourselves.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  4. 4.

    Somebody has to take responsibility for being a leader.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  5. 5.

    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.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  6. 6.

    I get angry about things, then go on and work.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  7. 7.

    I like marriage. The idea.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  8. 8.

    Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  9. 9.

    You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  10. 10.

    There is nothing of any consequence in education, in the economy, in city planning, in social policy that does not concern black people.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  11. 11.

    Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  12. 12.

    If you’re going to hold someone down you’re going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  13. 13.

    As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  14. 14.

    In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it’s nothing else but color.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  15. 15.

    My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren’t my children.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  16. 16.

    The body is ready to have babies. Nature wants it done then, when the body can handle it, not after 40, when the income can handle it.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  17. 17.

    A lot of black people believe that Jews in this country have become white. They behave like white people rather than Jewish people.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  18. 18.

    She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  19. 19.

    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.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  20. 20.

    I merged those two words, black and feminist, because I was surrounded by black women who were very tough and and who always assumed they had to work and rear children and manage homes.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  21. 21.

    Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  22. 22.

    I’m not entangled in shaping my work according to other people’s views of how I should have done it.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  23. 23.

    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.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  24. 24.

    If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  25. 25.

    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.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  26. 26.

    Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  27. 27.

    Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  28. 28.

    Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  29. 29.

    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.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  30. 30.

    Schools must stop being holding pens to keep energetic young people off the job market and off the streets. We stretch puberty out a long, long time.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  31. 31.

    We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  32. 32.

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

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  33. 33.

    I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  34. 34.

    It’s been mentioned or suggested that Paradise will not be well studied, because it’s about this unimportant intellectual topic, which is religion.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  35. 35.

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

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  36. 36.

    Everything I’ve ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  37. 37.

    Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich inherit it. I don’t mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  38. 38.

    For a long time I was convinced that the conflict between Jewish people and black people in this country was a media event.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  39. 39.

    When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  40. 40.

    I always looked upon the acts of racist exclusion, or insult, as pitiable, from the other person. I never absorbed that. I always thought that there was something deficient about such people.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  41. 41.

    If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  42. 42.

    There is really nothing more to say-except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  43. 43.

    One of my kids was born in 1968. There were going to be political difficulties, but they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  44. 44.

    Women’s rights is not only an abstraction, a cause; it is also a personal affair. It is not only about us; it is also about me and you. Just the two of us.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  45. 45.

    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.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  46. 46.

    I don’t think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they’re black or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money. That’s what we’re upset about.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  47. 47.

    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.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  48. 48.

    The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  49. 49.

    Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  50. 50.

    I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can’t teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort.

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic

  51. 51.

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

    Toni Morrison

    African American novelist, essayist, and academic