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The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.

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
Something
Triumphed
Dealt
Survived
Recognized
Presence
Evil
Firsts
First

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I sang O Holy Night in a school choir. My mother came and listened to me and complimented me. So that was the high point. I cannot sing a note.
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Make up a story... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.
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Think of anybody - Dostoevsky or Jane Austen - [their work] was always something that now we would call political. So I don't see those separations too much, between what is artistic and what is political. Maybe in painting... no, I don't even believe that.
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It seems to me everything Shakespeare did was political.
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All important things are hard.
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It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love ... You can't own a human being.
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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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The body is ready to have babies. Nature wants it done then, when the body can handle it, not after 40, when the income can handle it.
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Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another - physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.
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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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Womanists is what black feminists used to call themselves. Very much so. They were not the same thing. And also the relationship with men. Historically, black women have always sheltered their men because they were out there, and they were the ones that were most likely to be killed.
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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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Which was what love was: unmotivated respect.
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A friend gathers all the pieces and gives them back in the right order.
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Much handled things are always soft(27).
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Oppressive language does more than represent violence it is violence does more than represent the limits of knowledge it limits knowledge.
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I know there's some poetry that sort of sounds like daisies, but most of the good poetry is also [political], you can feel the heartbeat it's about some situation that concerns human beings under duress. It's suggesting a solution, or just acknowledging that [the situation] exists. Art does that.
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guileless and without vanity,we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our own skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness.
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For a long time I was convinced that the conflict between Jewish people and black people in this country was a media event.
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One of my kids was born in 1968. There were going to be political difficulties, but they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to.
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