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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
If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.
Toni Morrison
Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.
Toni Morrison
If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down.
Toni Morrison
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.
Toni Morrison
I couldn't bear to have people mispronounce my name. But the person I was was this person who was called Chloe.
Toni Morrison
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
Toni Morrison
I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.
Toni Morrison
The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.
Toni Morrison
The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one.
Toni Morrison
Oppressive language does more than represent violence it is violence does more than represent the limits of knowledge it limits knowledge.
Toni Morrison
Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.
Toni Morrison
You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question.
Toni Morrison
The unflattering reviews are painful for short periods of time the badly written ones are deeply, deeply insulting. That reviewer took no time to really read the book.
Toni Morrison
Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?
Toni Morrison
Pain. I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweettooth for it. Bolts of lightning, little rivulets of thunder. And I the eye of the storm.
Toni Morrison
The isolation, the separateness, is always a part of any utopia.
Toni Morrison
My metaphor is that evil always has a top hat and a cape, and goodness is over there in the corner. For me it's just too easy, if you hate your country or your wife, so you kill them. You can't think through that, you can't feel through that, you can't do the work. And now we have guns. Solution? I don't think so.
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
they ran in the sunlight, creating their own breeze which pressed their dresses into their damp skin. Reaching a kind of square of four locked trees which promised cooling they flung themselves into the shade to taste their lip sweat and contemplate the wildness that had come upon them so suddenly
Toni Morrison
Black women are the touchstone by which all that is human can be measured.
Toni Morrison
