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

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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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Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.
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I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me.
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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.
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You been gone too long, Sula. Not too long, but maybe too far.
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Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.
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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.
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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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You have to be willing to think the unthinkable.
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What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?
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It seems to me everything Shakespeare did was political.
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If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down.
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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.
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The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.
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I have a lot of respect for readers because I'm a reader. That's how I got into writing.
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guileless and without vanity,we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our own skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness.
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In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.
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Sifting daylight dissolves the memory, turns it into dust motes floating in light.
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The seeds of destruction lie in the definition of chosen-ness and can easily blossom into bigotry. It's not inevitable but it needs constant care to avoid.
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I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.
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