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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
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Belong
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More quotes by Toni Morrison
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.
Toni Morrison
Love it, love it and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.
Toni Morrison
Sometimes the names were humiliating, deliberately so. Somebody would pick out your flaw. If you were little, they would call you Shorty. And if you were angry, they would call you the Devil.
Toni Morrison
Jealousy we understood and thought natural... But envy was a strange, new feeling for us. And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us.
Toni Morrison
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.
Toni Morrison
If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic....Authors arrive at text and subtext in thousands of ways, learning each time they begin anew how to recognize a valuable idea and how to reader the texture that accompanies, reveals or displays it to its best advantage.
Toni Morrison
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.
Toni Morrison
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.
Toni Morrison
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.
Toni Morrison
An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.
Toni Morrison
The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.
Toni Morrison
The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers.
Toni Morrison
A dead hydrangea is as intricate and lovely as one in bloom. Bleak sky is as seductive as sunshine, miniature orange trees without blossom or fruit are not defective they are that.
Toni Morrison
What's the world for you if you can't make it up the way you want it?
Toni Morrison
I want to feel what I feel. What's mine. Even if it's not happiness, whatever that means. Because you're all you've got.
Toni Morrison
What's interesting about writing is the invention, the creative thing. Writing about myself is a yawn.
Toni Morrison
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.
Toni Morrison
If happiness is anticipation with certainty, we were happy.
Toni Morrison
When you stiffen, you know that whatever you stiffen about is very important. The stuff is important, the fear itself is information.
Toni Morrison
This is really skin privilege, the ranking of color in terms of its closeness to white people or white-skinned people and its devaluation according to how dark one is and the impact that has on people who are dedicated to the privileges of certain levels of skin color.
Toni Morrison