Toni Morrison citations (189 citations, Page 6)

Toni Morrison: 189 citations0 J'aime

Toni Morrison citations célèbres

“Ça fait mal de respirer quand il fait aussi froid, mais malgré tous les problèmes d'être coincés par l'hiver dans la ville, ils le supportent parce que tout vaut d'être sur l'Avenue Lenox à l'abri des sales Blancs et des trucs qu'ils inventent; là où les trottoirs, couverts de neige ou non, sont plus larges que les grandes rues des villes où ils sont nés et où des gens parfaitement ordinaires peuvent attendre à l'arrêt, monter dans le tramway, donner une pièce au conducteur et aller partout où ils veulent, même si on n'a pas envie d'aller si loin parce que tout ce qu'on veut est sur place : l'église, la boutique, la fête, les femmes, les hommes, la boîte à lettres (mais pas de lycée), le marchand de meubles, le vendeur de journaux ambulant, les bistrots clandestins (mais pas de banque), les instituts de beauté, les coiffeurs, les bars à juke-box, les voitures à glace, les chiffonniers, les salles de billard, les marchés couverts, les vendeurs de la loterie, et tous les clubs, organisations, syndicats, sociétés, fraternités, sororités ou associations imaginables. Les ornières de ces services, bien sûr, sont usées et des pistes sont lissées par les membres d'un groupe dans le territoire d'un autre où on croit qu'il y a quelque chose de curieux ou d'excitant. Un truc brillant, crépitant, effrayant. Là où on peut faire sauter le bouchon et porter la bouche glacée du verre à la sienne. Où on peut trouver le danger ou le devenir; où on peut se battre jusqu'à tomber et sourire au couteau quand il vous rate ou non. Juste voir ça, c'est merveilleux. Et c'est tour aussi merveilleux de savoir que dans son propre immeuble il y a des listes faites par les épouses pour envoyer le mari au marché couvert, que des draps impossibles à étendre sous la neige sont tendus dans les cuisines comme les rideaux dans un sketch de patronage sur l'Abyssinie.”

Toni Morrison livre Jazz

Jazz, 1992

“Je ne pleurais pas jamais. Jusqu'à la mort de mon fils.”

Toni Morrison

Réponse à la remarque « Vous avez dit que vous étiez une femme qui ne pleurait jamais… ».

“Le soleil de biais coupe les immeubles en deux comme un rasoir. Dans la moitié du haut je vois des visages qui regardent, difficile de dire qui sont les gens, qui l'œuvre des maçons. En bas, c'est l'ombre où a lieu n'importe quel truc blasé : clarinette ou baise, des poings et les voix tristes des femmes. Une ville comme celle-là me fait rêver grand et sentir les choses. Au secours. C'est l'acier brillant qui se balance au-dessus de l'ombre qui fait ça. quand je regarde les rubans d'herbe verte le long du fleuve, les clochers des églises et les entrées cuivre et crème des immeubles résidentiels, je suis forte.”

Toni Morrison livre Jazz

Jazz, 1992

“L'armistice avait huit ans l'hiver où Violette a dérangé les funérailles, et les anciens combattants de la Septième Avenue portent encore leurs capotes militaires, parce que rien de ce qu'ils peuvent se payer n'est aussi solide ou ne cache aussi bien ce dont ils s'étaient vantés en 1919. Huit ans plus tard, la veille des frasques de Violette, quand la neige arrive, elle reste là où elle tombe sur Lennox et aussi Park Avenue, et attend que les carrioles à chevaux la tassent en livrant du charbon aux chaudières qui refroidissent dans les caves. Dans ces gros immeubles de cinq étages et les étroites maisons en bois qui les séparent, les gens frappent aux portes pour savoir ce dont on a besoin ou qu'on peut donner.”

Toni Morrison livre Jazz

Jazz, 1992

“Je n'ai jamais vu la vie avec les yeux d'un blanc.”

Toni Morrison

Réponse à la question « Ce type de situations ne vous faisait pas enrager ? » à propos de l'ostracisation des noirs.

Toni Morrison: Citations en anglais

“All the time, I'm afraid the thing that happened that made it all right for my mother to kill my sister could happen again. I don't know what it is, I don't know who it is, but maybe there is something else terrible enough to make her do it again. I need to know what that thing might be, but I don't want to. Whatever it is, it comes from outside this house, outside the yard, and it can come right on in the yard if it wants to. So I never leave this house and I watch over the yard, so it can't happen again and my mother won't have to kill me too.”

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Toni Morrison livre Beloved

Source: Beloved (1987), Ch. 21

“I believe that one of the principle ways in which we acquire, hold, and digest information, is via narrative — so I hope you will understand when the remarks I make begin with the first sentence of our childhood — that we all remember — the phrase: "Once upon a time."”

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Toni Morrison

Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)

“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.”

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Toni Morrison livre Paradise

Paradise (1997)

“You marvel at the economy and this choice of words. How many ways can you describe the sky and the moon? After Sylvia Plath, what can you say?”

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Toni Morrison

On British mystery writer Ruth Rendell, The New York Times (6 October 2005)

“I am Beloved and she is mine. I see her take flowers away from leaves she puts them in a round basket the leaves are not for her she fills the basket she opens the grass I would help her but the clouds are in the way how can I say things that are pictures I am not separate from her there is no place where I stop her face is my own and I want to be there in the place where her face is and to be looking at it too a hot thing.”

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Toni Morrison livre Beloved

Source: Beloved (1987), Ch. 22

“Of course I'm a black writer…. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call "literature" is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hassidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.”

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Toni Morrison

Interview in Newsweek (30 March 1981)

“What for? What does a sixty-odd-year-old slavewoman who walks like a three-legged dog need freedom for? And when she stepped foot on free ground she could not believe that Halle knew what she didn’t; that Halle, who had never drawn one free breath, knew that there was nothing like it in this world. It scared her.”

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Toni Morrison livre Beloved

Beloved (1987)

“You need intelligence, and you need to look. You need a gaze, a wide gaze, penetrating and roving — thats what's useful for art.”

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Toni Morrison

Interview with Don Swaim (1987)

“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."”

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Toni Morrison livre Jazz

Jazz (1991) First lines

“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.”

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Toni Morrison livre Jazz

Jazz (1991) Ch. 2

“Nothing like other folks' sin for distraction.”

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Toni Morrison livre Paradise

Paradise (1997)

“Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.”

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Toni Morrison

Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)

“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.”

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Toni Morrison livre Beloved

Source: Beloved (1987), Ch. 28

“She had been so close, then closer. And it was so much better than the anger that ruled when Sethe did or thought anything that excluded herself. She could bear the hours — nine or ten of them each day but one — when Sethe was gone. Bear even the nights when she was close but out of sight, behind walls and doors lying next to him. But now — even the daylight time that Beloved had counted on, disciplined herself to be content with, was being reduced, divided by Sethe's willingness to pay attention to other things. Him mostly.”

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Toni Morrison livre Beloved

Source: Beloved (1987), Ch. 9

“white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President”

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Toni Morrison

About Bill Clinton. Comment, The New Yorker, 5 October 1998.
Source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1998/10/05/comment-6543

“Women's rights is not only an abstraction, a cause; it is also a personal affair. It is not only about "us"; it is also about me and you. Just the two of us.”

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Toni Morrison

Commencement address at Barnard College (May 1979) as quoted in Ms. magazine (September 1979)

“Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.”

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Toni Morrison

Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)

“This is not a story to pass on.”

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Toni Morrison livre Beloved

Source: Beloved (1987), Ch. 28

“The screams of a hurt woman were indistinguishable from everyday traffic.”

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Toni Morrison livre Paradise

Paradise (1997)

“The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.”

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Toni Morrison

"Black Matters" in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)

“I was thrilled that my mother is still alive and can share this with me. And I can claim representation in so many areas. I'm a Midwesterner, and everyone in Ohio is excited. I'm also a New Yorker, and a New Jerseyan, and an American, plus I'm an African-American, and a woman. I know it seems like I'm spreading like algae when I put it this way, but I'd like to think of the prize being distributed to these regions and nations and races.”

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Toni Morrison

On receiving the Nobel Prize, in The New York Times (8 October 1993) http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/01/11/home/28957.html

“It is sprinkling now. A teasing August rain that raises expectations it cannot fill.”

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Toni Morrison livre Beloved

Beloved (1987)

“Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they were right. The more coloredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.”

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Toni Morrison livre Beloved

Beloved (1987)

“Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers — not the defined.”

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Toni Morrison livre Beloved

Beloved (1987)

“With that, she gathered her blanket around her elbows and ascended the lily-white stairs like a bride. Outside, snow solidified itself into graceful forms. The peace of winter staars seemed permanent.”

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Toni Morrison livre Beloved

Beloved (1987)

“Could she sing? (Was it nice to hear when she did?) Was she pretty? Was she a good friend? Could she have been a loving mother? A faithful wife? Have I got a sister and does she favor me? If my mother knew me would she like me?”

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Toni Morrison livre Beloved

Beloved (1987)

“Unless carefree, motherlove was a killer.”

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Toni Morrison livre Beloved

Beloved (1987)

“Darkness or not, she moves rapidly around, reaching, touching cobwebs, cheese, slating shelves, the pallet interfering with each step. If she trumbles, she is not aware of it because she does not know where her body stops, which part of her is an arm, a foot or a knee. She feels like an ice cake torn away from the solid surface of the stream, floating on darkness, thick and crashing against the edges of things around it. Breakable, meltable and cold.”

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Toni Morrison livre Beloved

Beloved (1987)

“It was noon, quite light outside; inside it is not. A few cuts of sun break through the roof and walls but once there they are too weak to shift for themselves. Darkness is stronger and swallows them like minnows.”

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Toni Morrison livre Beloved

Beloved (1987)

“They killed the flirt whom folks called Life for leading them on. Making them think the next sunrise would be worth it; that another stroke of time would do it at last. Only when she was dead would they be safe. The successful ones — the ones who had been there enough years to have maimed, mutilated, maybe even buried her — kept watch over the others who were still in her cock-teasing hug, caring and looking forward, remembering and looking back.”

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Toni Morrison livre Beloved

Beloved (1987)

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