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

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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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Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth.
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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.
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You been gone too long, Sula. Not too long, but maybe too far.
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Race is the least reliable information you can have about someone. It's real information, but it tells you next to nothing.
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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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Womanists is what black feminists used to call themselves. Very much so. They were not the same thing. And also the relationship with men. Historically, black women have always sheltered their men because they were out there, and they were the ones that were most likely to be killed.
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What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?
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I don't work. I keep telling people I'm unemployed. And I don't wash dishes, and I don't wash clothes, and I don't clean my house. Somebody else does that.
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I began to realize that this idea of the lighter the better and the darker the worse was really - had an impact on sororities, on friendships, on all sorts of things, and it was stunning to me.
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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.
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If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.
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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.
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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.
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Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers.
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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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One of my kids was born in 1968. There were going to be political difficulties, but they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to.
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The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers.
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We read about how Ajax and Achilles will die for each other, but very little about the friendship of women.
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Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.
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