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I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway.

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
Solve
Problems
Character
Problem
Anything
Would
Subway
Thinking
Literary
Anyway

More quotes by Toni Morrison

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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
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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.
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The difference between that which is humane and that which is patriotic is a vital difference.
Toni Morrison
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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
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Black women are the touchstone by which all that is human can be measured.
Toni Morrison
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Sweet, she thought. He must think I can't bear to hear him say it. That after all I have told him and after telling me how many feet I have, goodbye would break me to pieces. Ain't that sweet. So long, she murmured from the far side of the trees.
Toni Morrison
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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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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
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Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.
Toni Morrison
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Usually I try to be there by six. Everything has been taken off the walls so that there's nothing to arrest my sight. On the bed I have Roget's Thesaurus, a dictionary, a Bible, and a deck of playing cards.
Toni Morrison
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I don't want you to write about what you know, because you don't know anything. I don't want to hear about your boyfriend or your grandma... I'm getting a little tired of 'my life story as fiction'. Please don't tell me about your little life - is there nothing larger? More important?
Toni Morrison
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A dead hydrangea is as intricate and lovely as one in bloom. Bleak sky is as seductive as sunshine, miniature orange trees without blossom or fruit are not defective they are that.
Toni Morrison
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Word-work is sublime... because it is generative it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference-the way in which we are like no other life. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
Toni Morrison
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Nobody loved her and she wouldn’t have liked it if they had, she considered love a serious disability.
Toni Morrison
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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.
Toni Morrison
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Beauty was not simply something to behold it was something one could do.
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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Everything depends on knowing how much,” she said, and “Good is knowing when to stop.
Toni Morrison
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Race is the least reliable information you can have about someone. It's real information, but it tells you next to nothing.
Toni Morrison
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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*
Toni Morrison