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You been gone too long, Sula. Not too long, but maybe too far.

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
Maybe
Gone
Long

More quotes by Toni Morrison

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Life that crawled, life that slunk and crept and never closed its eyes. Life that burrowed and scurried, and life so still it was indistinguishable from the ivy stems on which it lay. Birth, life, and death - each took place on the hidden side of a leaf.
Toni Morrison
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Listen, baby, people do funny things. Specially us. The cards are stacked against us and just trying to stay in the game, stay alive and in the game, makes us do funny things. Things we can't help. Things that make us hurt one another. We don't even know why.
Toni Morrison
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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.
Toni Morrison
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Writing is really a way of thinking--not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.
Toni Morrison
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Racism will disappear when it's no longer profitable, and no longer psychologically useful. And when that happens, it'll be gone. But at the moment, people make a lot of money off of it, pro and con.
Toni Morrison
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Intimacy is extremely important to me and I want it to be extremely important to the readers.
Toni Morrison
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He leans over and takes her hand. With the other he touches her face. ‘You your best thing, Sethe. You are.’ His holding fingers are holding hers. ‘Me? Me?
Toni Morrison
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Black women are the touchstone by which all that is human can be measured.
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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Most of our lives are spent in little towns, little towns all throughout the country. That's where we live. And that's where the juices come from and that's where we made it, not made it in terms of success but made who we are.
Toni Morrison
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An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.
Toni Morrison
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I know what every colored woman in this country is doing... Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I’m going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.
Toni Morrison
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When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.
Toni Morrison
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My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren't my children.
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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Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.
Toni Morrison
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The formula for creative writing in high school or college is write what you know.
Toni Morrison
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I don't do the things other people call play.
Toni Morrison
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Home is memory, home is your history, home is where you work. Some people want to abandon it and become truly local. But the questions are all there.
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