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I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life.

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
Life
Understand
History
Automatically
Past
Affects
Great
Contemporary
Way
Interested
Good
Deal
Think
Deals
Thinking
Present

More quotes by Toni Morrison

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Word-work is sublime... because it is generative it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference-the way in which we are like no other life. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
Toni Morrison
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Black women have always been friends. I mean, if you didn't have each other you had nothing.
Toni Morrison
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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.
Toni Morrison
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As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer.
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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.
Toni Morrison
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Something that is loved is never lost.
Toni Morrison
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There is really nothing more to say - except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.
Toni Morrison
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Hospitality is gold in this City you have to be clever to figure out how to be welcoming and defensive at the same time. When to love something and when to quit. If you don't know how, you can end up out of control or controlled by some outside thing like that hard case last winter.
Toni Morrison
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There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race - scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct... it has a social function, racism.
Toni Morrison
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It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love ... You can't own a human being.
Toni Morrison
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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.
Toni Morrison
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Perhaps that's what all human relationships boiled down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?
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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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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She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.
Toni Morrison
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I want to discourage you from choosing anything or making any decision simply because it is safe. Things of value seldom are
Toni Morrison
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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)
Toni Morrison
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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.
Toni Morrison
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Anything I have ever learned of any consequence, I have learned from Black people. I have never been bored by any Black person, ever.
Toni Morrison
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[Obama is ] creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom . . . [He is] the man for this time.
Toni Morrison