Quote

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)

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
Nothing
Danger
Much
Feeling
Knowing
Comes
Feelings
Brittle
Littles
Hopelessness
Little
Dry
Everything
Reverse

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I know it's trash: just another story made up to scare wicked females and correct unruly children. But it's all I have. I know I need something else. Something better. Like a story that shows how brazen women can take a good man down. I can hum to that.
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Sifting daylight dissolves the memory, turns it into dust motes floating in light.
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What I'm doing ain't about hating White people. It's about loving us.
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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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The isolation, the separateness, is always a part of any utopia.
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Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth.
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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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I thought the whole world was like Lorain.
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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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Now what? All the battles feminists won about not being a sex object, not being evaluated based on these things, that now other generations are wallowing in, the extremes they go to, to look sexually attractive? It's stunning how things that one fought desperately for are just being tossed aside with aplomb.
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All important things are hard.
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Love is never any better than the lover.
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My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren't my children.
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Maybe [I care about language] because I'm an editor, maybe because I'm picky, but it's all we got, don't shrink it. Don't dumb it out, make it little.
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I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway.
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Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.
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Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.
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I like marriage. The idea.
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Racism will disappear when it's no longer profitable, and no longer psychologically useful. And when that happens, it'll be gone. But at the moment, people make a lot of money off of it, pro and con.
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Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.
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