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Every now and then she looked around for tangible evidence of his having ever been there. Where were the butterflies? the blueberries? the whistling reed? She could find nothing, for he had left nothing but his stunning absence.

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
Find
Stunning
Ever
Tangible
Nothing
Butterfly
Every
Absence
Blueberries
Looked
Reed
Evidence
Whistling
Left
Reeds
Around
Butterflies

More quotes by 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.
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Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.
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Misery colored by the greens and blues in my mother's voice took away all the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet.
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I couldn't bear to have people mispronounce my name. But the person I was was this person who was called Chloe.
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They encouraged you to put some of your weight in their hands and soon as you felt how light and lovely it was, they studied your scars and tribulations.
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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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Don’t beg anybody for anything, especially love.
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I tell my students there is such a thing as 'writer's block,' and they should respect it. You shouldn't write through it. It's blocked because it ought to be blocked, because you haven't got it right now.
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Political doesn't necessarily mean you have an agenda.
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Evil is so seductive. It needs to grind you up and make you its slave.
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When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world?
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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.
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We're all surrounded by what I call faux language, fake language of commerce, of news media.
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I like marriage. The idea.
Toni Morrison
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For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone the flowers appear on the earth the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.
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I am in the position of judging people by the best they've ever done rather than the worst.
Toni Morrison
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My metaphor is that evil always has a top hat and a cape, and goodness is over there in the corner. For me it's just too easy, if you hate your country or your wife, so you kill them. You can't think through that, you can't feel through that, you can't do the work. And now we have guns. Solution? I don't think so.
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Isolation, you know, carries the seeds of its own destruction because as times change, other things seep in.
Toni Morrison
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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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Now he knew why he loved her so. Without ever leaving the ground, she could fly. 'There must be another one like you,' he whispered to her. 'There's got to be at least one more woman like you.
Toni Morrison