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When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world?

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
Differences
Alive
Happy
True
Need
Needs
World
Difference
Stay

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A dream is just a nightmare with lipstick.
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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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Intimacy is extremely important to me and I want it to be extremely important to the readers.
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Being able to laugh got me through.
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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.
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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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Women's rights is not only an abstraction, a cause it is also a personal affair. It is not only about us it is also about me and you. Just the two of us.
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the hopelessness that comes from knowing too little and feeling too much (so brittle, so dry he is in danger of the reverse: feeling nothing and knowing everything)
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All important things are hard.
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The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers.
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Political doesn't necessarily mean you have an agenda.
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I thought the whole world was like Lorain.
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You rely on a sentence to say more than the denotation and the connotation you revel in the smoke that the words send up.
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Not knowing it was hard knowing it was harder
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What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.
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I can't explain inspiration. A writer is either compelled to write or not. And if I waited for inspiration I wouldn't really be a writer.
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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 want to discourage you from choosing anything or making any decision simply because it is safe. Things of value seldom are
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No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you.
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The concept of physical beauty as a virtue is one of the dumbest, most pernicious and destructive ideas of the Western world, and we should have nothing to do with it.
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