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The function of freedom is to free someone else.

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
Responsibility
Freedom
Free
Else
Someone
Love
Revolutionary
Function

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It would be ten years before they saw each other again, and their meeting would be thick with birds.
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I tell my students one of the most important things they need to know is when they are at their best, creatively. They need to ask themselves, What does the ideal room look like? Is there music? Is there silence? Is there chaos outside or is there serenity outside? What do I need in order to release my imagination?
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We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.
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Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.
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Evil is so seductive. It needs to grind you up and make you its slave.
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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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I think women dwell quite a bit on the duress under which they work, on how hard it is just to do it at all. We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped creative work in there between the domestic chores and obligations. I'm not sure we deserve such big A-pluses for all that.
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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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Occasionally, as children, we might figure out how to call somebody a name, and they would figure out how to call us. But it wasn't - it was so light. It was so fluffy. I didn't really have a strong awareness of segregation and the separation of races until I left Lorain, Ohio.
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If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down.
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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)
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I know what every colored woman in this country is doing... Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I’m going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.
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Make up a story... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.
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Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.
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Now he knew why he loved her so. Without ever leaving the ground, she could fly. 'There must be another one like you,' he whispered to her. 'There's got to be at least one more woman like you.
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Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.
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Nobody loved her and she wouldn’t have liked it if they had, she considered love a serious disability.
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Lonely, ain't it? Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else's. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain't that something? A secondhand lonely.
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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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I sometimes lose interest in the characters and get much more interested in the trees and animals.
Toni Morrison