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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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A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves - a special kind of double.
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What I'm doing ain't about hating White people. It's about loving us.
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If happiness is anticipation with certainty, we were happy.
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Something that is loved is never lost.
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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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Well, feel this, why don't you? Feel how it feels to have a bed to sleep in and somebody there not worrying you to death about what you got to do each day to deserve it. Feel how that feels. And if that don't get it, feel how it feels to be a colored woman roaming the roads with anything God made liable to jump on you. Feel that.
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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.
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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.
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Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.
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You have to be willing to think the unthinkable.
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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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I know it's trash: just another story made up to scare wicked females and correct unruly children. But it's all I have. I know I need something else. Something better. Like a story that shows how brazen women can take a good man down. I can hum to that.
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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.
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The theme you choose may change or simply elude you, but being your own story means you can always choose the tone. It also means that you can invent the language to say who are you and what you mean.
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What's the world for you if you can't make it up the way you want it?
Toni Morrison
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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.
Toni Morrison
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Beauty was not simply something to behold it was something one could do.
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I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither.... So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.
Toni Morrison
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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.
Toni Morrison
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Think of anybody - Dostoevsky or Jane Austen - [their work] was always something that now we would call political. So I don't see those separations too much, between what is artistic and what is political. Maybe in painting... no, I don't even believe that.
Toni Morrison