top of page

"How soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like forever. As though there never was a time when they didn't love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Identity quotes

"She may have been among them but she could never be one of them. She was without inclusion for-as-much as she was not "one of the girls" and she wasn't "one of the guys." She was an outsider gazing in, endlessly comfortless, while they wished they had what it took to be less like the others and more like her."

"The image of God is in every human."

"When we speak, dress, and think like others, we live with the goal of achieving the approval they have."

"I'm not abnegation, I'm not dauntless, I am Divergent."

"I feel like how you matter is defined by the things that matter to you. You matter as much as the things that matter to you do. And I got so backwards, trying to make myself matter to him. All this time, there were real things to care about: real, good people who care about me, and this place. It's so easy to get stuck. You just get caught in being something, being special or cool or whatever, to the point where you don't even know why you need it; you just think you do."

"Your original self is worth more than your imitation of someone else."

"Without accepting ourselves, we try to meet requirements of society and do everything to be accepted."

"Find yourself, who are you?Choose yourself, who can you be?Define yourself to find your destination."

"It's not the appearance that makes a man, it's the man that makes an appearance."

"Ay every inch a king."
Explore more quotes by Toni Morrison


"I don't think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It's perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man."


"In Ohio seasons are theatrical. Each one enters like a prima donna, convinced its performance is the reason the world has people in it."


"The function, the very serious function of racism 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 you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn't shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing."


"Sethe, he says, "me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow."He leans over and takes her hand. With the other he touches her face. "You your best thing, Sethe, You are." His holding fingers are holding hers. "Me? Me?"


"Now they will rest before shouldering the endless work they were created to do down here in paradise."


"A lot of black people believe that Jews in this country have become white. They behave like white people rather than Jewish people."


"We don't need any more writers as solitary heroes. We need a heroic writer's movement: assertive, militant, pugnacious."


"It's been mentioned or suggested that Paradise will not be well studied, because it's about this unimportant intellectual topic, which is religion."
bottom of page