Toni Morrison Quotes

To contemplate is to look at shadows.

While you are looking, you might as well also listen, linger and think about what you see.

The present is always unsettled, no one has had time to contemplate it in tranquillity . I was a painter before I was a writer and a painter never wants the subject right under his nose; he wants to stand back and study a landscape with half-closed eyes.

We are not conscious of most things until we ask ourselves questions about them.

Think and wonder, wonder and think.

If one looks at a thing with the intention of trying to discover what it means, one ends up no longer seeing the thing itself, but of thinking of the question that is raised.

For I have always been a seeker, a dreamer, and a ponderer on seeking and dreaming.

To be silent is not to lose your tongue. On the contrary, it is only through silence that one can discover something new to talk about. One who talked incessantly, without stopping to look and listen, would repeat himself ad nauseam.

Mirrors would do well to reflect a little more before sending back images.

Its never too late to take a moment to look.

Wherever I go I need a period of incubation so that I may learn the essence of nature, which never wishes to be understood or yield herself.

Let us leave a little room for reflection in our lives, room too for silence. Let us look within ourselves and see whether there is some delightful hidden place inside where we can be free of noise and argument. Let us hear the Word of God in stillness and perhaps we will then come to understand it.

Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience; to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder upon it, and dwell upon it.

I have always loved the gaps, the spaces between things, as much as the things. I love staring, pondering, mulling, puttering. I love the times when someone or something is late-there's that rich possibility of noticing more, in the meantimePoetry calls us to pause. There is so much we overlook, while the abundance around us continues to shimmer, on its own.

Watching I watch myself, what I see is my creation as though entering through my eyes perception is conception into an eye more crystal clear water of thoughts, what I watch watches me, I am the creation of what I see

Rivers and the inhabitants of the watery element were made for wise men to contemplate, and fools to pass by without consideration.

There may be men who act without understanding why. I do not. To listen much, pick out the good and follow it; to see much and ponder it: this comes next to understanding.

Whatever we think about and question a lot becomes questionable.

I always have been introspective, since I was a little kid, since I could remember, I was sitting in a closet trying to write out the meaning of the universe. That's been my whole life.

... but one loves, and when one is on the brink of death, one turns around to look backward, and one says to oneself: "I have often suffered, I have sometimes been wrong, but I have loved.

You must look at facts, because they look at you.

I try not to get impressed. I just try to look at what I see.

It is looking at things for a long time that ripens you and gives you a deeper meaning.

It is a flat'ning Thought, that the more we have seen, the less we have to say.

Wisdom comes with the ability to be still. Just look and listen. No more is needed.