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What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.

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
Political
Define
Power
Revolutionary
Able
Debate
Really
Defined
Think
Taking
Thinking
Name
Names
Away
Correctness

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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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What I'm doing ain't about hating White people. It's about loving us.
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Intimacy is extremely important to me and I want it to be extremely important to the readers.
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You been gone too long, Sula. Not too long, but maybe too far.
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If happiness is anticipation with certainty, we were happy.
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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.
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Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs—all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured
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I dream a dream that dreams back at me.
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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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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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The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one.
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In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it's nothing else but color.
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Maybe [I care about language] because I'm an editor, maybe because I'm picky, but it's all we got, don't shrink it. Don't dumb it out, make it little.
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The past is interesting to me because it's been dumbed down or flattened out, or academically nitpicked so you can't get any life out of it, you just get data.
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Something that is loved is never lost.
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Your life is already artful-waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.
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To get to a place where you could love anything you chose--not to need permission for desire--well now _that_ was freedom.
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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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