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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

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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
Fear
Worthy
Feelings
Hatred
Beautiful
Understood
Thought
Strange
Peal
Thing
Knew
Maureen
Made
Enemy
Jealousy
Time
Feeling
Envy
Natural
Intense

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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.
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I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.
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The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one.
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The habit of getting up early, which I had formed when the children were young, now became my choice. I am not very bright or very witty or very inventive after the sun goes down.
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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.
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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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There is an incredible amount of magic and feistiness in black men that nobody has been able to wipe out. But everybody has tried.
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I'm not entangled in shaping my work according to other people's views of how I should have done it.
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Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face you are me.
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The language must be careful and must appear effortless. It must not sweat. It must suggest and be provocative at the same time.
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You looked at me then like you knew me, and I thought it really was Eden, and I couldn't take your eyes in because I was loving the hoof marks on your cheeks.
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Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.
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I guess I'm depressed. I don't know. I can't explain it. Part of it is the irritability of being 84, and part of it is being not as physically strong as I once was. And part of it is my misunderstanding, I think, of what's going on in the world.
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Oppressive language does more than represent violence it is violence does more than represent the limits of knowledge it limits knowledge.
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Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It's not having no responsibilitie s it's choosing the ones you want.
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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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I can't explain inspiration. A writer is either compelled to write or not. And if I waited for inspiration I wouldn't really be a writer.
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I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.
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What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?
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