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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

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I don't work. I keep telling people I'm unemployed. And I don't wash dishes, and I don't wash clothes, and I don't clean my house. Somebody else does that.
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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.
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A friend gathers all the pieces and gives them back in the right order.
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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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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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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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We read about how Ajax and Achilles will die for each other, but very little about the friendship of women.
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Whatever happens, whether you get rich or stay poor, ruin your health or live to old age, you always end up back where you started: hungry for the one thing everybody loses - young loving.
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Books ARE a form of political action. Books are knowledge. Books are reflection. Books change your mind.
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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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Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?
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Lonely, ain't it? Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else's. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain't that something? A secondhand lonely.
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You rely on a sentence to say more than the denotation and the connotation you revel in the smoke that the words send up.
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Language can never 'pin down' slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity, is in its reach toward the ineffable.
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We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.
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I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.
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A dead hydrangea is as intricate and lovely as one in bloom. Bleak sky is as seductive as sunshine, miniature orange trees without blossom or fruit are not defective they are that.
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I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.
Toni Morrison
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Our ancestors are an ever widening circle of hope.
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I sometimes lose interest in the characters and get much more interested in the trees and animals.
Toni Morrison