Toni Morrison Quotes About Literature

Quotes about: Literature

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

  Toni Morrison

  Art, African American, Tolerance

  Toni Morrison, Danille Kathleen Taylor-Guthrie (1994). “Conversations with Toni Morrison”, p.258, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.

  Toni Morrison

  Friendship, Beautiful, Real Friends

  Toni Morrison (2014). “Beloved”, Random House

• Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face; you are me.

  Toni Morrison

  Mom, Daughter, Literature

  "Beloved". Book by Toni Morrison, September 1987.

• In Tar Baby, the classic concept of the individual with a solid, coherent identity is eschewed for a model of identity which sees the individual as a kaleidoscope of heterogeneous impulses and desires, constructed from multiple forms of interaction with the world as a play of difference that cannot be completely comprehended.

  Toni Morrison

  Baby, Play, Differences

• Like Guitar in Son of Solomon, and Son in Tar Baby, he believed that harmony could never exist between the races.

  Toni Morrison

  Baby, Son, Race

• 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.

  Toni Morrison

  Song, Children, Flirting

• Literature, it seems to me, is wisdom.

  Toni Morrison

  Literature, Seems

  Source: theharvardadvocate.com

• Some literature is knowledge, some is just data. But if I can get a "happy" ending - which is when for the characters I'm writing about, something happens that they move from wherever they are in the beginning to knowledge or wisdom, they know something they never would have acknowledged or realized if it hadn't been for my book - that for me is what literature does.

  Toni Morrison

  Moving, Book, Character

  Source: theharvardadvocate.com

• Most of the really good literature I've read in my life was political, meaning it was important - about something going on in the history of the world - or contemporary.

  Toni Morrison

  Political, Important, Literature

  Source: theharvardadvocate.com

• Of course I'm a black writer... I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call "literature" is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

  Toni Morrison

  Latin, Writing, Black

  Newsweek Interview, March 30, 1981.

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin