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Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.

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
Boys
Lives
Criminalized
Fear
Targets
Black
Dread
Stills
Target
Still
Everywhere
Constant
Became

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Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.
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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. No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens — that letting go — you let go because you can.
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The function of freedom is to free someone else.
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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?
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Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.
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If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic....Authors arrive at text and subtext in thousands of ways, learning each time they begin anew how to recognize a valuable idea and how to reader the texture that accompanies, reveals or displays it to its best advantage.
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I don't want you to write about what you know, because you don't know anything. I don't want to hear about your boyfriend or your grandma... I'm getting a little tired of 'my life story as fiction'. Please don't tell me about your little life - is there nothing larger? More important?
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The formula for creative writing in high school or college is write what you know.
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the hopelessness that comes from knowing too little and feeling too much (so brittle, so dry he is in danger of the reverse: feeling nothing and knowing everything)
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In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it's nothing else but color.
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One of my kids was born in 1968. There were going to be political difficulties, but they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to.
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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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A dead hydrangea is as intricate and lovely as one in bloom. Bleak sky is as seductive as sunshine, miniature orange trees without blossom or fruit are not defective they are that.
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Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth.
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It was my father who could do no wrong. So I didn't think of it as, oh, look, my father's a violent man.
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But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.
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I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway.
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I want to feel what I feel. What's mine. Even if it's not happiness, whatever that means. Because you're all you've got.
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