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Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers.
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
Writers
Called
American
Enjoy
Native
More quotes by Toni Morrison
Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth.
Toni Morrison
...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.
Toni Morrison
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.
Toni Morrison
If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.
Toni Morrison
Listen, baby, people do funny things. Specially us. The cards are stacked against us and just trying to stay in the game, stay alive and in the game, makes us do funny things. Things we can't help. Things that make us hurt one another. We don't even know why.
Toni Morrison
Maybe [I care about language] because I'm an editor, maybe because I'm picky, but it's all we got, don't shrink it. Don't dumb it out, make it little.
Toni Morrison
In Ohio seasons are theatrical. Each one enters like a prima donna, convinced its performance is the reason the world has people in it.
Toni Morrison
Love it, love it and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.
Toni Morrison
Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers - not the defined.
Toni Morrison
Sifting daylight dissolves the memory, turns it into dust motes floating in light.
Toni Morrison
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
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.
Toni Morrison
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
He said, 'Always. Always.
Toni Morrison
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
If happiness is anticipation with certainty, we were happy.
Toni Morrison
But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.
Toni Morrison
You have to be willing to think the unthinkable.
Toni Morrison
For a long time I was convinced that the conflict between Jewish people and black people in this country was a media event.
Toni Morrison
You rely on a sentence to say more than the denotation and the connotation you revel in the smoke that the words send up.
Toni Morrison