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What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?

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
Real
Thing
Make
Scared
Difference
Differences

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Most of the really good literature I've read in my life was political, meaning it was important - about something going on in the history of the world - or contemporary.
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How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.
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Isolation, you know, carries the seeds of its own destruction because as times change, other things seep in.
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The formula for creative writing in high school or college is write what you know.
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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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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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If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.
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Our ancestors are an ever widening circle of hope.
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Not knowing it was hard knowing it was harder
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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. No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens — that letting go — you let go because you can.
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I think women dwell quite a bit on the duress under which they work, on how hard it is just to do it at all. We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped creative work in there between the domestic chores and obligations. I'm not sure we deserve such big A-pluses for all that.
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Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not, permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.
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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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The function of freedom is to free someone else.
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I tell my students one of the most important things they need to know is when they are at their best, creatively. They need to ask themselves, What does the ideal room look like? Is there music? Is there silence? Is there chaos outside or is there serenity outside? What do I need in order to release my imagination?
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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.
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Sunk in the grass of an empty lot on a spring Saturday, I split the stems of milkweed and thought about ants and peach pits and death and where the world went when I closed my eyes.
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Anything dead coming back to life hurts.
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Love it, love it and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.
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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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