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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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Defined
Beloved
Belong

More quotes by Toni Morrison

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Well, feel this, why don't you? Feel how it feels to have a bed to sleep in and somebody there not worrying you to death about what you got to do each day to deserve it. Feel how that feels. And if that don't get it, feel how it feels to be a colored woman roaming the roads with anything God made liable to jump on you. Feel that.
Toni Morrison
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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.
Toni Morrison
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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.
Toni Morrison
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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
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He said, 'Always. Always.
Toni Morrison
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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.
Toni Morrison
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I like marriage. The idea.
Toni Morrison
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I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither.... So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.
Toni Morrison
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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
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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.
Toni Morrison
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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.
Toni Morrison
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When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world?
Toni Morrison
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Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.
Toni Morrison
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Sifting daylight dissolves the memory, turns it into dust motes floating in light.
Toni Morrison
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It was my father who could do no wrong. So I didn't think of it as, oh, look, my father's a violent man.
Toni Morrison
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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....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
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A friend gathers all the pieces and gives them back in the right order.
Toni Morrison
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Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.
Toni Morrison
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At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.
Toni Morrison
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How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.
Toni Morrison