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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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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
Thinking
Emotion
Range
World
Greater
Emotions
People
Black
Access
Seems
Perception
Persons
Neither
Person
Female
Shrink
Really
Bigger
Perceptions
Think
Writer
Shrinks

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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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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.
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When you stiffen, you know that whatever you stiffen about is very important. The stuff is important, the fear itself is information.
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We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.
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Everything depends on knowing how much,” she said, and “Good is knowing when to stop.
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A son ain't what a woman say. A son is what a man do.
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A friend gathers all the pieces and gives them back in the right order.
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As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer.
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If happiness is anticipation with certainty, we were happy.
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When you know your name, you should hang on to it, for unless it is noted down and remembered, it will die when you do.
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For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction.
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Black women are the touchstone by which all that is human can be measured.
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Grab this land! Take it, hold it, my brothers, make it, my brothers, shake it, squeeze it, turn it, twist it, beat it, kick it, kiss it, whip it, stomp it, dig it, plow it, seed it, reap it, rent it, buy it, sell it, own it, build it, multiply it, and pass it on — can you hear me? Pass it on!
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There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.
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I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me.
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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.
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Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth.
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I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer - its dust and lowering skies.
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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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The concept of physical beauty as a virtue is one of the dumbest, most pernicious and destructive ideas of the Western world, and we should have nothing to do with it.
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