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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
Became
Boys
Lives
Criminalized
Fear
Targets
Black
Dread
Stills
Target
Still
Everywhere
Constant
More quotes by Toni Morrison
I can't explain inspiration. A writer is either compelled to write or not. And if I waited for inspiration I wouldn't really be a writer.
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Something that is loved is never lost.
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Writing is really a way of thinking--not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.
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You marvel at the economy and this choice of words. How many ways can you describe the sky and the moon? After Sylvia Plath, what can you say?
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If happiness is anticipation with certainty, we were happy.
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How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.
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For a long time I was convinced that the conflict between Jewish people and black people in this country was a media event.
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The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.
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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.
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Think of anybody - Dostoevsky or Jane Austen - [their work] was always something that now we would call political. So I don't see those separations too much, between what is artistic and what is political. Maybe in painting... no, I don't even believe that.
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If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up.
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You have to be willing to think the unthinkable.
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I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life.
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It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love ... You can't own a human being.
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My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren't my children.
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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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I thought the whole world was like Lorain.
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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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Everything depends on knowing how much,” she said, and “Good is knowing when to stop.
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Your life is already artful-waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.
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