Toni Morrison Quotes

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.

What has always attracted me in life is poetry. Any genre can have poetry. For me, poetry contains truth.

I like words. Words are places, rooms, distant airs, thin and tropical. They make us feel and imagine we are more than our bodies.

All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

I still don't even know if the sheriff will let me see him. And suppose he did; what then? What do I say to him? Do I know what a man is? Do I know how a man is supposed to die? I'm still trying to find out how a man should live. Am I supposed to tell someone how to die who has never lived?

We live and breathe words.

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.

The secret of life is in art.

The object of art is to give life shape.

Speech is our second possession, after the soul-and perhaps we have no other possession in this world.

However, as words become particularized, and as men begin - in however small a way - to use them in personal, arbitrary ways, so their transformation into art begins. It was words of this kind that, descending on me like a swarm of winged insects, seized on my individuality and sought to shut me up within it. Nevertheless, despite the enemy's depredations upon my person, I turned their universality - at once a weapon and a weakness - back on them, and to some extent succeeded in using words to universalize to my own individuality.

Words of the world are the life of the world.

Writing is making sense of life.

Speech is the mark of humanity. It is the normal terminus of thought.

It is commonly thought that everything that is can be put into words.

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance.

There are two important days in a woman's life: the day she is born and the day she finds out why.

What I'm after is that wakeful state through language that stays alive.

Death is a dramatic accomplishment of absence; language may be almost as effective.

Death focuses the mind on the things that really matter: why are we here, and what should we do?

Without art there is no hope.

When I write characters, I need to hear their voice. As soon as I get them speaking, and I feel how they use language, I understand who they are and what they want.

I think sometimes writers must attempt to communicate the incommunicable, because, whether they wish it or not, they're the ones to whom it falls.