Toni Morrison Quotes

I wandered through the streets thinking of all the things I might have said and might have done had I been other than I was.

I am pretty sick with myself! It seemed a pretty good idea at the time. Around the time I turned 30, I started to feel very creative, more creative than I had been before which is good and I like that.

Sometimes I lie awake at night, and ask, 'Where have I gone wrong?' Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take more than one night.'

I like to read my diary occasionally to remind myself what a miserable, alienated old sod I used to be.

In the past, my aspirations were as arty as they could get, and I'm really embarrassed by it.

It brings me no joy and not enough comfort to dwell too much on things I've said or written or made or worn in the past.

I have a pretty clear picture of the whole weight of my life, and there are things that I've done that are good, and I'm proud of them. There are things that I'm really not proud of, and that they, you have to look at me with a perspective, and I try really hard to do that, to keep from thinking I'm cool and ever so smart.

To regret fully is to appreciate how high the stakes are in even the average human life; fully experienced, it turns our eyes, attentive and alert, to a future possibly lived better than our past.

I don't feel like a very nostalgic person. I think about the past much more clinically. When I look back and wonder, 'Why was I doing that? Was it a waste of time?' I don't beat myself up. Instead, I say, 'I'm so glad I did that, because now I really know what matters to me.'

In bed at night, I could be reading some book, and I'll come across a sentence that's totally unrelated to some scene I did years ago. But I'll play the scene back in my mind and think, I did that wrong - I should've opened the door more slowly.

I do always look back and feel faintly embarrassed by anything I've done in the past. I think that's not a terrible thing, because if you don't do that, how are you growing and moving forward?

I've criticized myself over the years.

I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron.... I should have been able to do better.

I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.

I like to think the world wasn't ready for me, but maybe the truth is that I wasn't ready for the world. I've always arrived too late for my life.

I did nothing that I might not have done better.

Don’t do what you know on a gut level to be the wrong thing to doI don’t think there’s a single dumbass thing I’ve done in my adult life that I didn’t know was a dumbass thing to do while I was doing it. Even when I justified it to myself—as I did every damn time—the truest part of me knew I was doing the wrong thing. Always. As the years pass, I’m learning how to better trust my gut and not do the wrong thing, but every so often I get a harsh reminder that I’ve still got work to do.

I think it's always important to reflect anyway, no matter what age you're approaching or what milestone is in front of you. Reflection should be almost a daily thing if possible.

I'm not good," he said, piercing me with eyes that absorbed all light but reflected none, "but I was worse.

Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems.

Thinking of someone else is what got me damned. It’s a mistake I don’t want to repeat. (Xypher) You know sometimes it’s by repeating our mistakes that we realize what went wrong the first time. Knowing that, we’re able to fix the mistake and move past it. (Acheron)

I was wasting my life, always thinking about myself.

Sometimes I lie awake at night thinking about all the dumb things I do every day... If I live to be eighty and I do ten dumb things each day... That would be about two hundred and ninety thousand dumb things... When you add up all the dumb things you do, it's best to use round figures.

I found myself in the changed man theory the other night thinking, "Yeah." I thought, "My god. If we could do this again," but there was nothing specific there. There's just the kind of vague sensation of how I'd like it to go. I allowed myself that gift to think that.

My past is everything I failed to be.