Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison
Toni Morrisonis an American novelist, editor, and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed characters. Among her best known novels are The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth18 February 1931
CityLorain, OH
CountryUnited States of America
mother breakup country
One of the monstrous things that slavery in this country caused was the breakup of families. Physical labor, horrible; beatings, horrible; lynching death, all of that, horrible. But the living life of a parent who has no control over what happens to your children, none. They don't belong to you. You may not even nurse them. They may be shipped off somewhere, as in "Beloved" the mother was, to be nursed by somebody who was not able to work in the fields and was a wet nurse.
important want intimacy
Intimacy is extremely important to me and I want it to be extremely important to the readers.
reading writing thinking
I think one of the reasons I'm so thrilled with writing is because it is an act of reading for me at the same time, which is why my revisions are so sustained.
jobs struggle book
I feel like today we always glorify the young, just-plucked-from-college writer. But it's much harder to start writing later, in middle age, struggling on a book around a full-time job and family.
beautiful mother distance
In my mother's church, everybody read the Bible and it was mostly about music. My mother had the most beautiful voice I have ever heard in my life. She could sing anything - classical, jazz, blues, opera. And people came from long distances to that little church she went to - African Methodist Episcopal, the AME church she belonged to - just hear her.
dark skin-color white
This is really skin privilege, the ranking of color in terms of its closeness to white people or white-skinned people and its devaluation according to how dark one is and the impact that has on people who are dedicated to the privileges of certain levels of skin color.
war school europe
I lived in a little working-class town that had no black neighborhoods at all - one high school. We all played together. Everybody was either somebody from the South or an immigrant from East Europe or from Mexico. And there was one church, and there were four elementary schools. And we were all, pretty much until the end of the war, very, very poor.
father men thinking
It was my father who could do no wrong. So I didn't think of it as, oh, look, my father's a violent man.
ideas impact sorority
I began to realize that this idea of the lighter the better and the darker the worse was really - had an impact on sororities, on friendships, on all sorts of things, and it was stunning to me.
clothes people house
I don't work. I keep telling people I'm unemployed. And I don't wash dishes, and I don't wash clothes, and I don't clean my house. Somebody else does that.
mother school night
I sang "O Holy Night" in a school choir. My mother came and listened to me and complimented me. So that was the high point. I cannot sing a note.
real father thinking
I don't think I knew any of my father's friends - male friends - by their real names. I remember them only by their nicknames.
names devil littles
Sometimes the names were humiliating, deliberately so. Somebody would pick out your flaw. If you were little, they would call you Shorty. And if you were angry, they would call you the Devil.
names people bears
I couldn't bear to have people mispronounce my name. But the person I was was this person who was called Chloe.