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.
("Beloved")
More Quotes from Toni Morrison:
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.Toni Morrison
Make a difference about something other than yourselves.
Toni Morrison
In trying to make the slave experience intimate, I hoped the sense of things being both under control and out of control would be persuasive throughout; that the order and quietitude of every day life would be violently disrupted by the chaos of the needy dead; that the herculean effort to forget would be threatened by memory desperate to stay alive. To render enslavement as a personal experience, language must first get out of the way.
Toni Morrison
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.
Toni Morrison
You have pissed your last in this house . . . and I don't make velvet roses anymore.
Toni Morrison
For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.
Toni Morrison
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