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Who really said it

If you want to fly, give up everything that weighs you down

Toni Morrison — and the real wording is blunter Toni Morrison 1931–2019 · American novelist, editor and Nobel laureate
Disputed In copyright

It comes from Song of Solomon (1977), Toni Morrison’s third novel. Guitar Bains is explaining to Milkman why a peacock cannot get airborne — too much tail, too much jewellery, too much vanity — and finishes: ‘Can’t nobody fly with all that shit.’ The tidy inspirational version is that speech with the swearing taken out and the peacock deleted. Morrison died in 2019, so this is a copyrighted novel, not scripture.

Last verified 21 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“If you want to fly, give up everything that weighs you down” Morrison actually wrote: "Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can't nobody fly with all that shit." — Song of Solomon (1977). Not the Buddha. In copyright.

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Buddha. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

Still under copyright. A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the world of Toni Morrison — American novelist, editor, and Nobel laureate. Theme: "If you want to fly, give up everything that weighs you down". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "If you want to fly, give up everything that weighs you down". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The source

Work
Song of Solomon
Published
1977
In the book
Chapter 8 — Guitar Bains to Milkman Dead
Author
Toni Morrison, 1931–2019

Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can't nobody fly with all that shit. Song of Solomon, 1977

The published wording, quoted briefly for identification and commentary. We keep the swear word because it is the evidence: it is the single thing the fake version had to remove.

Fake Buddha Quotes — tracing it to Morrison

How we traced it

  • The passage is a set piece of the novel: the two men watch a white peacock in a car lot, and Guitar reads the bird as a lesson about what Milkman is carrying. Standard study guides index it to chapter 8 and to Guitar as the speaker the flight motif ↗.
  • The Buddha attribution has no textual home. Bodhipaksa’s Fake Buddha Quotes traces the meme back to Morrison and notes the giveaway — whoever converted it into scripture had the sense to drop the profanity, because no translation of the Pali canon reads like that the debunk ↗.
  • A second wording from the same speech — ‘You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down’ — circulates widely and is also Morrison’s. Both are the novel; neither is a proverb.
In copyright

In copyright — and the misattribution is what obscures that. Song of Solomon was published in 1977 and Toni Morrison died in 2019; the novel is protected in the United States into the 2070s and, on a life-plus-seventy term, until 2089 in the UK and EU. A short quotation with author and title is ordinary practice. Selling it on a print, a candle or a yoga-studio wall is not, and calling it a Buddha quote does not make it free — it just makes a living estate’s property look like a 2,500-year-old public-domain teaching. This is not legal advice.

Fact-check

The attribution problem

This one is a laundering operation, and you can see the seams. A named living-memory novelist becomes an anonymous ancient sage, a peacock in a car lot becomes a metaphysical principle, and a swear word disappears.

Not the Buddha no text, anywhere

Nothing resembling it appears in the Pali canon or any recognised Buddhist scripture. There is no sutta number offered with the meme because there is none to offer the debunk ↗.

Sanitised altered text

Morrison’s line ends ‘Can’t nobody fly with all that shit.’ The inspirational version replaces that with ‘everything that weighs you down’ — which is a paraphrase of the meaning and a deletion of the voice.

A character, not the author context stripped

Guitar Bains says it to Milkman, about a peacock, in a novel where flight is also abandonment — men who fly away leave women and children behind. Morrison is not handing out life advice; she is setting a trap.

Because ancient sounds free convenient

An unattributed sage costs nothing and asks no permission. A Nobel laureate who died in 2019 has an estate. The false credit is not just sloppy — it is commercially useful to whoever is printing the mug.

Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (1977) — spoken by Guitar Bains about a peacock, profanity included the scene ↗.

Context

Why it resonates

The image does the work: a peacock, the most spectacular bird available, grounded by its own splendour. Everyone recognises the feeling of being weighed down by things they chose and now cannot put down.

Morrison also gets there in one breath and no abstractions — tail, jewellery, vanity, done. That compression is why it survives the trip through the internet, even when everything around it is thrown away.

The swear word is the evidence. It is the one thing the fake version had to remove.

What the sanitised version loses

The profanity is not decoration. It is Guitar’s voice, and the whole point is that this wisdom arrives from a young Black man in a car lot rather than from a temple.

In the novel, flight is not straightforwardly good. Men fly away; the people they leave behind are the cost. The meme keeps only the uplift.

It is being said to Milkman about Milkman — an accusation about his life, not a slogan for yours.

The Buddha credit strips the swear, the peacock, the speaker and the copyright in a single move. Fixing the attribution puts all four back.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Freedom Simplicity

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

'If you want to fly, give up everything that weighs you down'fakebuddhaquotes.com

The debunk: the line is Morrison’s, and the profanity was dropped to make it pass as Buddhist.
Flight as a symbol in Song of Solomonlitcharts.com

The peacock scene in context, and why flight runs through the whole novel.
Guitar Bains — character analysislitcharts.com

Who is actually speaking — and why that matters to what the line means.

The real author

About Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison

1931–2019 · American novelist, editor, and Nobel laureate

Toni Morrison spent years as an editor at Random House before her own novels — Song of Solomon, Beloved, Sula — made her the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her people talk like people: profane, funny, mid-argument. That is precisely why her lines get laundered on the way to the internet, arriving smooth, solemn and stripped of the character who said them and the reason he was saying it.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — Chicago

Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon, chapter 8. New York, 1977.

MLA (9th ed.)

Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. 1977.

APA (7th ed.)

Morrison, T. (1977). Song of Solomon.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘If you want to fly, give up everything that weighs you down’?” Last verified 21 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/if-you-want-to-fly-give-up-everything-that-weighs-you

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