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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
Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.
Toni Morrison
In Ohio seasons are theatrical. Each one enters like a prima donna, convinced its performance is the reason the world has people in it.
Toni Morrison
You been gone too long, Sula. Not too long, but maybe too far.
Toni Morrison
We're all surrounded by what I call faux language, fake language of commerce, of news media.
Toni Morrison
Race is the least reliable information you can have about someone. It's real information, but it tells you next to nothing.
Toni Morrison
The body is ready to have babies. Nature wants it done then, when the body can handle it, not after 40, when the income can handle it.
Toni Morrison
Your life is already artful-waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.
Toni Morrison
They encouraged you to put some of your weight in their hands and soon as you felt how light and lovely it was, they studied your scars and tribulations.
Toni Morrison
Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.
Toni Morrison
For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction.
Toni Morrison
As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer.
Toni Morrison
An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.
Toni Morrison
Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.
Toni Morrison
For a long time I was convinced that the conflict between Jewish people and black people in this country was a media event.
Toni Morrison
Hospitality is gold in this City you have to be clever to figure out how to be welcoming and defensive at the same time. When to love something and when to quit. If you don't know how, you can end up out of control or controlled by some outside thing like that hard case last winter.
Toni Morrison
How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.
Toni Morrison
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
The formula for creative writing in high school or college is write what you know.
Toni Morrison
The past is interesting to me because it's been dumbed down or flattened out, or academically nitpicked so you can't get any life out of it, you just get data.
Toni Morrison
Language can never 'pin down' slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity, is in its reach toward the ineffable.
Toni Morrison