Quote

She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.

Toni Morrison

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Toni Morrison
Age: 88 †
Born: 1931
Born: February 18
Died: 2019
Died: August 5
Audiobook Narrator
Librettist
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Lorain
Ohio
Chloe Ardelia Wofford
Chloe Anthony Wofford-Morrison
Chloe Anthony Wofford
Morrison
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison
Truthful
Right
Friendship
Giving
Friend
Mind
Pieces
Good
Woman
Men
Order
Give
Gather
Back

More quotes by Toni Morrison

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...when the little boy discovered, at four, the same thing Mr. Smith had learned earlier -- that only birds and planes could fly -- he lost all interest in himself.
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If you can't count, they can cheat you. If you can't read, they can beat you.
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Being able to laugh got me through.
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I don't work. I keep telling people I'm unemployed. And I don't wash dishes, and I don't wash clothes, and I don't clean my house. Somebody else does that.
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I couldn't bear to have people mispronounce my name. But the person I was was this person who was called Chloe.
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Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It's not having no responsibilitie s it's choosing the ones you want.
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Listen, baby, people do funny things. Specially us. The cards are stacked against us and just trying to stay in the game, stay alive and in the game, makes us do funny things. Things we can't help. Things that make us hurt one another. We don't even know why.
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Black women are the touchstone by which all that is human can be measured.
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Occasionally, as children, we might figure out how to call somebody a name, and they would figure out how to call us. But it wasn't - it was so light. It was so fluffy. I didn't really have a strong awareness of segregation and the separation of races until I left Lorain, Ohio.
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they ran in the sunlight, creating their own breeze which pressed their dresses into their damp skin. Reaching a kind of square of four locked trees which promised cooling they flung themselves into the shade to taste their lip sweat and contemplate the wildness that had come upon them so suddenly
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There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.
Toni Morrison
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Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this mission.
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To get to a place where you could love anything you chose--not to need permission for desire--well now _that_ was freedom.
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If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.
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Misery colored by the greens and blues in my mother's voice took away all the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet.
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Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you'd have a little love left over for the next one.
Toni Morrison
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The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.
Toni Morrison
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I know what every colored woman in this country is doing... Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I’m going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.
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For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone the flowers appear on the earth the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.
Toni Morrison
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Gimme hate, Lord,” he whimpered. “I’ll take hate any day. But don’t give me love. I can’t take no more love, Lord. I can’t carry it...It’s too heavy. Jesus, you know, you know all about it. Ain’t it heavy? Jesus? Ain’t love heavy?
Toni Morrison