Top Ten: Toni Morrison

"At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens — that letting go — you let go because you can." - Tar Baby

"Anger... it's a paralyzing emotion... you can't get anything done. People sort of think it's an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling — I don't think it's any of that — it's helpless... it's absence of control — and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers — and I need clarity, in order to write — and anger doesn't provide any of that — I have no use for it whatsoever." - Interview with Don Swaim 

"If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it." - Song of Solomon 

"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." - Nobel Prize Lecture

"Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down." - Song of Solomon

"What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them." - The New York Times

"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." - Jazz

"We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives."  - Nobel Prize Lecture

"I remember a very important lesson that my father gave me when I was twelve or thirteen. He said, 'You know, today I welded a perfect seam and I signed my name to it.' And I said, "But, Daddy, no one's going to see it!" And he said, 'Yeah, but I know it's there.'" - The New York Times

"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." - Paradise