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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
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Done
Work
People
Entangled
Shaping
According

More quotes by Toni Morrison

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Oppressive language does more than represent violence it is violence does more than represent the limits of knowledge it limits knowledge.
Toni Morrison
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The race thing is sort of a misnomer. It's just the human race, right? That's it. The rest of it, and racism, is socially constructed. Nobody is born racist, no one. What happens is other things that are usually based on power, money, feeling good about yourself, or bad about yourself, those things play into hating other people for whatever reason.
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You rely on a sentence to say more than the denotation and the connotation you revel in the smoke that the words send up.
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I want to discourage you from choosing anything or making any decision simply because it is safe. Things of value seldom are
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Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? The Lion or the Mouse? Poppy or the Snake?
Toni Morrison
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I guess I'm depressed. I don't know. I can't explain it. Part of it is the irritability of being 84, and part of it is being not as physically strong as I once was. And part of it is my misunderstanding, I think, of what's going on in the world.
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Most of the really good literature I've read in my life was political, meaning it was important - about something going on in the history of the world - or contemporary.
Toni Morrison
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Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.
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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.
Toni Morrison
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...when the little boy discovered, at four, the same thing Mr. Smith had learned earlier -- that only birds and planes could fly -- he lost all interest in himself.
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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*
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Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.
Toni Morrison
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Misery colored by the greens and blues in my mother's voice took away all the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet.
Toni Morrison
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The isolation, the separateness, is always a part of any utopia.
Toni Morrison
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Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.
Toni Morrison
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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.
Toni Morrison
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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
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We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.
Toni Morrison
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The theme you choose may change or simply elude you, but being your own story means you can always choose the tone. It also means that you can invent the language to say who are you and what you mean.
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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