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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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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
Feelings
Writing
Really
Unresolved
Way
Disparate
Things
Problematic
Thinking
Mysterious
Sweet
Feeling
More quotes by Toni Morrison
If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down.
Toni Morrison
...when the little boy discovered, at four, the same thing Mr. Smith had learned earlier -- that only birds and planes could fly -- he lost all interest in himself.
Toni Morrison
I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.
Toni Morrison
Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not, permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.
Toni Morrison
Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.
Toni Morrison
Hospitality is gold in this City you have to be clever to figure out how to be welcoming and defensive at the same time. When to love something and when to quit. If you don't know how, you can end up out of control or controlled by some outside thing like that hard case last winter.
Toni Morrison
Can't nothing heal without pain, you know.
Toni Morrison
Much handled things are always soft(27).
Toni Morrison
Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.
Toni Morrison
Girl, I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me...my lonely is mine.
Toni Morrison
I know there's some poetry that sort of sounds like daisies, but most of the good poetry is also [political], you can feel the heartbeat it's about some situation that concerns human beings under duress. It's suggesting a solution, or just acknowledging that [the situation] exists. Art does that.
Toni Morrison
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.
Toni Morrison
Women's rights is not only an abstraction, a cause it is also a personal affair. It is not only about us it is also about me and you. Just the two of us.
Toni Morrison
The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.
Toni Morrison
My father saw two black men lynched on his street in Cartersville, as a child. And I think seeing two black businessmen - not vagrants - hanging from trees as a child was traumatic for him.
Toni Morrison
There's a difference between writing for a living and writing for life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises.... If you write for life, you'll work hard you'll do what's honest, not what pays
Toni Morrison
In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it's nothing else but color.
Toni Morrison
Something that is loved is never lost.
Toni Morrison
No gasp at a miracle that is truly miraculous because the magic lies in the fact that you knew it was there for you all along.
Toni Morrison
Black women have always been friends. I mean, if you didn't have each other you had nothing.
Toni Morrison