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Oppressive language does more than represent violence it is violence does more than represent the limits of knowledge it limits knowledge.

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
Doe
Oppressive
Represent
Limits
Violence
Knowledge
Language
Black

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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.
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Womanists is what black feminists used to call themselves. Very much so. They were not the same thing. And also the relationship with men. Historically, black women have always sheltered their men because they were out there, and they were the ones that were most likely to be killed.
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Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It's not having no responsibilitie s it's choosing the ones you want.
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Anything dead coming back to life hurts.
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Perhaps that's what all human relationships boiled down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?
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Make up a story... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.
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Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.
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Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.
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A dream is just a nightmare with lipstick.
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What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.
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The habit of getting up early, which I had formed when the children were young, now became my choice. I am not very bright or very witty or very inventive after the sun goes down.
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If happiness is anticipation with certainty, we were happy.
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Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.
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You have to be willing to think the unthinkable.
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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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...the City is what they want it to be: thriftless, warm, scary and full of amiable strangers. No wonder they forget pebbly creeks and when they do not forget the sky completely think of it as a tiny piece of information about the time of day or night.
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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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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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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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I sometimes lose interest in the characters and get much more interested in the trees and animals.
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