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More Quotes by Toni Morrison
Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.
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.
Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.
Make a difference about something other than yourselves.
There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race - scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct... it has a social function, racism.
All important things are hard.
Laughter is more serious than tears.
Your life is already artful-waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.
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.
