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In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it's nothing else but color.

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
American
Common
Else
Immigrant
Nothing
Immigrants
Contempt
Europe
Becoming
Color

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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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A bestseller is a book that non-book buyers buy
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At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.
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Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers - not the defined.
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Evil is so seductive. It needs to grind you up and make you its slave.
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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?
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In Ohio seasons are theatrical. Each one enters like a prima donna, convinced its performance is the reason the world has people in it.
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Occasionally, as children, we might figure out how to call somebody a name, and they would figure out how to call us. But it wasn't - it was so light. It was so fluffy. I didn't really have a strong awareness of segregation and the separation of races until I left Lorain, Ohio.
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Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.
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I like marriage. The idea.
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The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.
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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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Not knowing it was hard knowing it was harder
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Anything dead coming back to life hurts.
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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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If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic....Authors arrive at text and subtext in thousands of ways, learning each time they begin anew how to recognize a valuable idea and how to reader the texture that accompanies, reveals or displays it to its best advantage.
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[Obama is ] creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom . . . [He is] the man for this time.
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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.
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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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