# Toni Morrison - Quotes: 72 - Author page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/toni-morrison ## Books - [Jazz](https://www.leafyquotes.com/toni-morrison/jazz.md) — 3 quotes - [Paradise](https://www.leafyquotes.com/toni-morrison/paradise.md) — 6 quotes - [Song of Solomon](https://www.leafyquotes.com/toni-morrison/song-of-solomon.md) — 4 quotes - [Sula](https://www.leafyquotes.com/toni-morrison/sula.md) — 5 quotes ## Recently added quotes > Which was what love was: unmotivated respect. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/toni-morrison/paradise/which-was-what.md) > Nothing like other folks' sin for distraction. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/toni-morrison/paradise/nothing-like-other.md) > Born lost. Take over the world and still lost. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/toni-morrison/paradise/born-lost-take.md) > Let me tell you about love, that silly word you believe is about whether you like somebody or whether somebody likes you or whether you can put up with somebody in order to get something or someplace you want or you believe it has to do with how your body responds to another body like robins or bison or maybe you believe love is how forces or nature or luck is benign to you in particular not maiming or killing you but if so doing it for your own good. Love is none of that. There is nothing in nature like it. Not in robins or bison or in the banging tails of your hunting dogs and not in blossoms or suckling foal. Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God. You do not deserve love regardless of the suffering you have endured. You do not deserve love because somebody did you wrong. You do not deserve love just because you want it. You can only earn - by practice and careful contemplations - the right to express it and you have to learn how to accept it. Which is to say you have to earn God. You have to practice God. You have to think God-carefully. And if you are a good and diligent student you may secure the right to show love. Love is not a gift. It is a diploma. A diploma conferring certain privileges: the privilege of expressing love and the privilege of receiving it. How do you know you have graduated? You don't. What you do know is that you are human and therefore educable, and therefore capable of learning how to learn, and therefore interesting to God, who is interested only in Himself which is to say He is interested only in love. Do you understand me? God is not interested in you. He is interested in love and the bliss it brings to those who understand and share the interest. Couples that enter the sacrament of marriage and are not prepared to go the distance or are not willing to get right with the real love of God cannot thrive. They may cleave together like robins or gulls or anything else that mates for life. But if they eschew this mighty course, at the moment when all are judged for the disposition of their eternal lives, their cleaving won't mean a thing. God bless the pure and holy. Amen. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/toni-morrison/paradise/let-me-tell.md) > Now they will rest before shouldering the endless work they were created to do down here in paradise. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/toni-morrison/paradise/now-they-will.md) > The screams of a hurt woman were indistinguishable from everyday traffic. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/toni-morrison/paradise/the-screams-of-a-hurt.md) > Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going. When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral to see the girl and to cut her dead face they threw her to the floor and out of the church. She ran, then, through all that snow, and when she got back to her apartment she took the birds from their cages and set them out the windows to freeze or fly, including the parrot that said, "I love you." [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/toni-morrison/jazz/sth-i-know.md) > Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name. Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don't know her name? Although she has claim, she is not claimed. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/toni-morrison/beloved/everybody-knew-what.md) > I am not dead I sit the sun closes my eyes when I open them I see the face I lost Sethe's is the face that left me Sethe sees me see her and I see the smile her smiling face is the place for me it is the face I lost she is my face smiling at me doing it at last a hot thing now we can join. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/toni-morrison/beloved/i-am-not.md) > Garner called and announced them men — but only on Sweet Home, and by his leave. Was he naming what he saw or creating what he did not? [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/toni-morrison/beloved/garner-called-and.md) > Anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn't like yourself anymore. And though she and others lived through and got over it, she could never let it happen to her own. The best things she was, was her children. Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing — the part of her that was clean. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/toni-morrison/beloved/anybody-white-could.md) > This is not a story to pass on. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/toni-morrison/beloved/this-is-not.md)