Toni MorrisonThinkers

Africanism is the denotative and connotative blackness that african peoples have come to signify.

The Ancestor is an ever widening circle of hope.

Anger is a lovely surging in which there is a sense of being, a reality and presence, an awareness of worth.

Anger is a paralyzing emotion that doesn't allow one to get anything done. It's neither an interesting, passionate, or igniting feeling. Rather, it's helpless. It's absence of control.

Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction.

Beauty is not simply something to behold... it is something one could do.

Beauty is treated as a virtue. This is one of the dumbest, most pernicious and destructive ideas of the Western world.

A Bestseller is a book that non-book buyers buy.

Blackness gives one access to a greater range of emotions and perceptions than available to a person who lacks it.

Chosen-ness is a concept whereby the seeds of destruction lie in the very word and can easily blossom into bigotry if constant care is not taken.

Connotation is at the heart of literature where one allows a sentence to say more than its denotation, even more than its connotation. It allows us to revel in the smoke that the words send up.

A Dream is just a nightmare with lipstick.

The Dream's subject is the dreamer.