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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
Triumphed
Something
Dealt
Survived
Recognized
Presence
Evil
Firsts
First

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I have a lot of respect for readers because I'm a reader. That's how I got into writing.
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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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I know what every colored woman in this country is doing... Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I’m going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.
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I don't think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It's perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man.
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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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Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not, permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.
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Political doesn't necessarily mean you have an agenda.
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Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.
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It had been the longest time since she had had a rib-scraping laugh. She had forgotten how deep and down it could be. So different from the miscellaneous giggles and smiles she had learned to be content with these past few years.
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There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race - scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct... it has a social function, racism.
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When a child walks in the room, your child or anybody else’s child, do your eyes light up? That’s what they’re looking for.
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Home is memory, home is your history, home is where you work. Some people want to abandon it and become truly local. But the questions are all there.
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Being able to laugh got me through.
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When you know your name, you should hang on to it, for unless it is noted down and remembered, it will die when you do.
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Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this mission.
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I thought the whole world was like Lorain.
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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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We're all surrounded by what I call faux language, fake language of commerce, of news media.
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Black women have always been friends. I mean, if you didn't have each other you had nothing.
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The habit of getting up early, which I had formed when the children were young, now became my choice. I am not very bright or very witty or very inventive after the sun goes down.
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