Quote

If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.

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
Ends
Confined
Someone
Chain
Going
Ties
Oppression
Chains
Diversity
Hold
Peace
Repression

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Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face you are me.
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The race thing is sort of a misnomer. It's just the human race, right? That's it. The rest of it, and racism, is socially constructed. Nobody is born racist, no one. What happens is other things that are usually based on power, money, feeling good about yourself, or bad about yourself, those things play into hating other people for whatever reason.
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Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.
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Lonely, ain't it? Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else's. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain't that something? A secondhand lonely.
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I want to discourage you from choosing anything or making any decision simply because it is safe. Things of value seldom are
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There is an incredible amount of magic and feistiness in black men that nobody has been able to wipe out. But everybody has tried.
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...the City is what they want it to be: thriftless, warm, scary and full of amiable strangers. No wonder they forget pebbly creeks and when they do not forget the sky completely think of it as a tiny piece of information about the time of day or night.
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Love is never any better than the lover.
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Something that is loved is never lost.
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Sifting daylight dissolves the memory, turns it into dust motes floating in light.
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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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My metaphor is that evil always has a top hat and a cape, and goodness is over there in the corner. For me it's just too easy, if you hate your country or your wife, so you kill them. You can't think through that, you can't feel through that, you can't do the work. And now we have guns. Solution? I don't think so.
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Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.
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Most of the really good literature I've read in my life was political, meaning it was important - about something going on in the history of the world - or contemporary.
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We read about how Ajax and Achilles will die for each other, but very little about the friendship of women.
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If happiness is anticipation with certainty, we were happy.
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Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live
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The formula for creative writing in high school or college is write what you know.
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Well, feel this, why don't you? Feel how it feels to have a bed to sleep in and somebody there not worrying you to death about what you got to do each day to deserve it. Feel how that feels. And if that don't get it, feel how it feels to be a colored woman roaming the roads with anything God made liable to jump on you. Feel that.
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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.
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