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In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.

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
Inspirational
Else
Country
Mean
Racism
Everybody
American
White
Means

More quotes by Toni Morrison

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Sweet, she thought. He must think I can't bear to hear him say it. That after all I have told him and after telling me how many feet I have, goodbye would break me to pieces. Ain't that sweet. So long, she murmured from the far side of the trees.
Toni Morrison
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Home is memory, home is your history, home is where you work. Some people want to abandon it and become truly local. But the questions are all there.
Toni Morrison
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I know there's some poetry that sort of sounds like daisies, but most of the good poetry is also [political], you can feel the heartbeat it's about some situation that concerns human beings under duress. It's suggesting a solution, or just acknowledging that [the situation] exists. Art does that.
Toni Morrison
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Racism will disappear when it's no longer profitable, and no longer psychologically useful. And when that happens, it'll be gone. But at the moment, people make a lot of money off of it, pro and con.
Toni Morrison
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It was becoming a habit-this concentration on things behind him. Almost as though there were no future to be had. *Milkman*
Toni Morrison
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All important things are hard.
Toni Morrison
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No gasp at a miracle that is truly miraculous because the magic lies in the fact that you knew it was there for you all along.
Toni Morrison
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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.
Toni Morrison
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I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer - its dust and lowering skies.
Toni Morrison
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A friend gathers all the pieces and gives them back in the right order.
Toni Morrison
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Did you ever see the way the clouds love a mountain? They circle all around it sometimes you can't even see the mountain for the clouds. But you know what? ... The clouds never cover the head. His head pokes through, because the clouds let him they don't wrap him up. They let him keep his head high, free.
Toni Morrison
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You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone.
Toni Morrison
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Now what? All the battles feminists won about not being a sex object, not being evaluated based on these things, that now other generations are wallowing in, the extremes they go to, to look sexually attractive? It's stunning how things that one fought desperately for are just being tossed aside with aplomb.
Toni Morrison
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Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.
Toni Morrison
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When you know your name, you should hang on to it, for unless it is noted down and remembered, it will die when you do.
Toni Morrison
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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.
Toni Morrison
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The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers.
Toni Morrison
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Girl, I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me...my lonely is mine.
Toni Morrison
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What's interesting about writing is the invention, the creative thing. Writing about myself is a yawn.
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