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More Quotes by Toni Morrison
Don’t beg anybody for anything, especially love.
The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one.
I want to discourage you from choosing anything or making any decision simply because it is safe. Things of value seldom are.
You are your own stories and therefore free to imagine and experience what it means to be human... And although you don't have complete control over the narrative - no author does, I can tell you - you could nevertheless create it.
If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.
It's important, therefore, to know who the real enemy is, and to know the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn't shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Someone says you have no art so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.
Your life is already artful-waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.
From my point of view, your life is already a miracle of chance waiting for you to shape its destiny.
Racism will disappear when it's no longer profitable, and no longer psychologically useful. And when that happens, it'll be gone. But at the moment, people make a lot of money off of it, pro and con.
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.
