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Beauty was not simply something to behold it was something one could do.

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
Behold
Simply
Beauty
Something

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I have a lot of respect for readers because I'm a reader. That's how I got into writing.
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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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...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.
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In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.
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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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She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.
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Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.
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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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If happiness is anticipation with certainty, we were happy.
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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.
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Well, feel this, why don't you? Feel how it feels to have a bed to sleep in and somebody there not worrying you to death about what you got to do each day to deserve it. Feel how that feels. And if that don't get it, feel how it feels to be a colored woman roaming the roads with anything God made liable to jump on you. Feel that.
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Usually I try to be there by six. Everything has been taken off the walls so that there's nothing to arrest my sight. On the bed I have Roget's Thesaurus, a dictionary, a Bible, and a deck of playing cards.
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Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live
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There is an incredible amount of magic and feistiness in black men that nobody has been able to wipe out. But everybody has tried.
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When a child walks in the room, your child or anybody else’s child, do your eyes light up? That’s what they’re looking for.
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I am in the position of judging people by the best they've ever done rather than the worst.
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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
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Each member of the family in his own cell of consciousness, each making his own patchwork quilt of reality - collecting fragments of experience here, pieces of information there. From the tiny impressions gleaned from one another, they created a sense of belonging and tried to make do with the way they found each other.
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Not knowing it was hard knowing it was harder
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What's the world for you if you can't make it up the way you want it?
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