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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
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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
Behinds
Behind
Becoming
Almost
Though
Future
Milkman
Things
Concentration
Habit
More quotes by Toni Morrison
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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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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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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Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.
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There is no civilization that did not begin with art, Whether it was drawing a line in the sand, painting a cave or dancing.
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If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up.
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Each member of the family in his own cell of consciousness, each making his own patchwork quilt of reality - collecting fragments of experience here, pieces of information there. From the tiny impressions gleaned from one another, they created a sense of belonging and tried to make do with the way they found each other.
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When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.
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Nobody loved her and she wouldn’t have liked it if they had, she considered love a serious disability.
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Black women are the touchstone by which all that is human can be measured.
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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.
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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's the world for you if you can't make it up the way you want it?
Toni Morrison
To get to a place where you could love anything you chose--not to need permission for desire--well now _that_ was freedom.
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The theme you choose may change or simply elude you, but being your own story means you can always choose the tone. It also means that you can invent the language to say who are you and what you mean.
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The race thing is sort of a misnomer. It's just the human race, right? That's it. The rest of it, and racism, is socially constructed. Nobody is born racist, no one. What happens is other things that are usually based on power, money, feeling good about yourself, or bad about yourself, those things play into hating other people for whatever reason.
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There's a difference between writing for a living and writing for life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises.... If you write for life, you'll work hard you'll do what's honest, not what pays
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I don't work. I keep telling people I'm unemployed. And I don't wash dishes, and I don't wash clothes, and I don't clean my house. Somebody else does that.
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I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither.... So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.
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Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?
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