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

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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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Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.
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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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Most of the really good literature I've read in my life was political, meaning it was important - about something going on in the history of the world - or contemporary.
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I'm just trying to look at something without blinking, to see what it is like, or it could have been like, and how that had something to do with the way we live now. Novels are always inquiries for me.
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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.
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What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?
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Much handled things are always soft(27).
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Can't nothing heal without pain, you know.
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I feel like today we always glorify the young, just-plucked-from-college writer. But it's much harder to start writing later, in middle age, struggling on a book around a full-time job and family.
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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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If happiness is anticipation with certainty, we were happy.
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Our ancestors are an ever widening circle of hope.
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Unpersecuted, unjailed, unharrassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world's resources.
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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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The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.
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An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.
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If you can't count, they can cheat you. If you can't read, they can beat you.
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If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.
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I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.
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