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I'm not entangled in shaping my work according to other people's views of how I should have done it.

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
Entangled
Shaping
According
Views
Done
Work
People

More quotes by Toni Morrison

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I think women dwell quite a bit on the duress under which they work, on how hard it is just to do it at all. We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped creative work in there between the domestic chores and obligations. I'm not sure we deserve such big A-pluses for all that.
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When you stiffen, you know that whatever you stiffen about is very important. The stuff is important, the fear itself is information.
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Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.
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Black women have always been friends. I mean, if you didn't have each other you had nothing.
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I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me.
Toni Morrison
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The screams of a hurt woman were indistinguishable from everyday traffic.
Toni Morrison
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The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one.
Toni Morrison
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We're all surrounded by what I call faux language, fake language of commerce, of news media.
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Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.
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The language must be careful and must appear effortless. It must not sweat. It must suggest and be provocative at the same time.
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You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question.
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Most of our lives are spent in little towns, little towns all throughout the country. That's where we live. And that's where the juices come from and that's where we made it, not made it in terms of success but made who we are.
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There's a difference between writing for a living and writing for life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises.... If you write for life, you'll work hard you'll do what's honest, not what pays
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A dream is just a nightmare with lipstick.
Toni Morrison
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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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Life that crawled, life that slunk and crept and never closed its eyes. Life that burrowed and scurried, and life so still it was indistinguishable from the ivy stems on which it lay. Birth, life, and death - each took place on the hidden side of a leaf.
Toni Morrison
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Whatever happens, whether you get rich or stay poor, ruin your health or live to old age, you always end up back where you started: hungry for the one thing everybody loses - young loving.
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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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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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I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.
Toni Morrison