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Sunk in the grass of an empty lot on a spring Saturday, I split the stems of milkweed and thought about ants and peach pits and death and where the world went when I closed my eyes.

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
Peach
Eye
Stem
Sunk
Death
Saturday
Stems
Thought
Closed
World
Grass
Peaches
Spring
Pits
Empty
Ants
Went
Split
Milkweed
Eyes
Splits

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Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this mission.
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I tell my students one of the most important things they need to know is when they are at their best, creatively. They need to ask themselves, What does the ideal room look like? Is there music? Is there silence? Is there chaos outside or is there serenity outside? What do I need in order to release my imagination?
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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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Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It's not having no responsibilitie s it's choosing the ones you want.
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Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.
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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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Did you ever see the way the clouds love a mountain? They circle all around it sometimes you can't even see the mountain for the clouds. But you know what? ... The clouds never cover the head. His head pokes through, because the clouds let him they don't wrap him up. They let him keep his head high, free.
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My father saw two black men lynched on his street in Cartersville, as a child. And I think seeing two black businessmen - not vagrants - hanging from trees as a child was traumatic for him.
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The unflattering reviews are painful for short periods of time the badly written ones are deeply, deeply insulting. That reviewer took no time to really read the book.
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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.
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I sometimes lose interest in the characters and get much more interested in the trees and animals.
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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.
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I couldn't bear to have people mispronounce my name. But the person I was was this person who was called Chloe.
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He leans over and takes her hand. With the other he touches her face. ‘You your best thing, Sethe. You are.’ His holding fingers are holding hers. ‘Me? Me?
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Most of our lives are spent in little towns, little towns all throughout the country. That's where we live. And that's where the juices come from and that's where we made it, not made it in terms of success but made who we are.
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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.
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they ran in the sunlight, creating their own breeze which pressed their dresses into their damp skin. Reaching a kind of square of four locked trees which promised cooling they flung themselves into the shade to taste their lip sweat and contemplate the wildness that had come upon them so suddenly
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