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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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Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.
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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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It would be ten years before they saw each other again, and their meeting would be thick with birds.
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I guess I'm depressed. I don't know. I can't explain it. Part of it is the irritability of being 84, and part of it is being not as physically strong as I once was. And part of it is my misunderstanding, I think, of what's going on in the world.
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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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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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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.
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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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I sang O Holy Night in a school choir. My mother came and listened to me and complimented me. So that was the high point. I cannot sing a note.
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The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.
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Nelson Mandela is, for me, the single statesman in the world. The single statesman, in that literal sense, who is not solving all his problems with guns. It's truly unbelievable.
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There is really nothing more to say - except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.
Toni Morrison
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I'm not entangled in shaping my work according to other people's views of how I should have done it.
Toni Morrison
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In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.
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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My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren't my children.
Toni Morrison
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She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it's there, because it can't hurt, and because what difference does it make?
Toni Morrison
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The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.
Toni Morrison
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Books ARE a form of political action. Books are knowledge. Books are reflection. Books change your mind.
Toni Morrison
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It had been the longest time since she had had a rib-scraping laugh. She had forgotten how deep and down it could be. So different from the miscellaneous giggles and smiles she had learned to be content with these past few years.
Toni Morrison