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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)

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

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To get to a place where you could love anything you chose--not to need permission for desire--well now _that_ was freedom.
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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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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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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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Most of the really good literature I've read in my life was political, meaning it was important - about something going on in the history of the world - or contemporary.
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The function of freedom is to free someone else.
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The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.
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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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For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction.
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Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.
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Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.
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Listen, baby, people do funny things. Specially us. The cards are stacked against us and just trying to stay in the game, stay alive and in the game, makes us do funny things. Things we can't help. Things that make us hurt one another. We don't even know why.
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Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs—all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured
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Whatever happens, whether you get rich or stay poor, ruin your health or live to old age, you always end up back where you started: hungry for the one thing everybody loses - young loving.
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She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.
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The past is interesting to me because it's been dumbed down or flattened out, or academically nitpicked so you can't get any life out of it, you just get data.
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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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There's a difference between writing for a living and writing for life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises.... If you write for life, you'll work hard you'll do what's honest, not what pays
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Girl, I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me...my lonely is mine.
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Writing is really a way of thinking--not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.
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