Quote

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

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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
Honest
Living
Compromises
Write
Pays
Hard
Compromise
Writing
Enormous
Work
Pay
Make
Difference
Life
Differences

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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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I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.
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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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Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face you are me.
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the hopelessness that comes from knowing too little and feeling too much (so brittle, so dry he is in danger of the reverse: feeling nothing and knowing everything)
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Unless carefree, mother love was a killer.
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Nobody loved her and she wouldn’t have liked it if they had, she considered love a serious disability.
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Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.
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Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.
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Maybe [I care about language] because I'm an editor, maybe because I'm picky, but it's all we got, don't shrink it. Don't dumb it out, make it little.
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Listen, baby, people do funny things. Specially us. The cards are stacked against us and just trying to stay in the game, stay alive and in the game, makes us do funny things. Things we can't help. Things that make us hurt one another. We don't even know why.
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You have to be willing to think the unthinkable.
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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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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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What do you say? There really are no words for that. There really aren't. Somebody tries to say, 'I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.' People say that to me. There's no language for it. Sorry doesn't do it. I think you should just hug people and mop their floor or something.
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Being able to laugh got me through.
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Intimacy is extremely important to me and I want it to be extremely important to the readers.
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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.
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The function of freedom is to free someone else.
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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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