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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
Nothing
Immigrants
Contempt
Europe
Becoming
Color
American
Common
Else
Immigrant

More quotes by 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.
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Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live
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Political doesn't necessarily mean you have an agenda.
Toni Morrison
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Evil is just sort of ultimately boring. The good thing is just complicated. It's more provocative to me and more stimulating to me.
Toni Morrison
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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 presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.
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Think of anybody - Dostoevsky or Jane Austen - [their work] was always something that now we would call political. So I don't see those separations too much, between what is artistic and what is political. Maybe in painting... no, I don't even believe that.
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It seems to me everything Shakespeare did was political.
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Make up a story... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.
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It was my father who could do no wrong. So I didn't think of it as, oh, look, my father's a violent man.
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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I like marriage. The idea.
Toni Morrison
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When a child walks in the room, your child or anybody else’s child, do your eyes light up? That’s what they’re looking for.
Toni Morrison
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I thought the whole world was like Lorain.
Toni Morrison
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It would be ten years before they saw each other again, and their meeting would be thick with birds.
Toni Morrison
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For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone the flowers appear on the earth the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.
Toni Morrison
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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.
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Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another - physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.
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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As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer.
Toni Morrison