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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
World
Difference
Stay
Differences
Alive
Happy
True
Need
Needs

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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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Perhaps that's what all human relationships boiled down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?
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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 alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.
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What's the world for you if you can't make it up the way you want it?
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Her mind traveled crooked streets and aimless goat paths, arriving sometimes at profundity, other times at the revelations of a three-year-old. Throughout this fresh, if common, pursuit of knowledge, one conviction crowned her efforts: ...she knew there was nothing to fear.
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But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.
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There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.
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I think women dwell quite a bit on the duress under which they work, on how hard it is just to do it at all. We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped creative work in there between the domestic chores and obligations. I'm not sure we deserve such big A-pluses for all that.
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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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I am in the position of judging people by the best they've ever done rather than the worst.
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Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.
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I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me.
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The function of freedom is to free someone else.
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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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In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it's nothing else but color.
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You have to be willing to think the unthinkable.
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Gimme hate, Lord,” he whimpered. “I’ll take hate any day. But don’t give me love. I can’t take no more love, Lord. I can’t carry it...It’s too heavy. Jesus, you know, you know all about it. Ain’t it heavy? Jesus? Ain’t love heavy?
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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*
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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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