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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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Girl, I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me...my lonely is mine.
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Political doesn't necessarily mean you have an agenda.
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To get to a place where you could love anything you chose--not to need permission for desire--well now _that_ was freedom.
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Something that is loved is never lost.
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A son ain't what a woman say. A son is what a man do.
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The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.
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If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.
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There is no civilization that did not begin with art, Whether it was drawing a line in the sand, painting a cave or dancing.
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Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another - physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.
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Our ancestors are an ever widening circle of hope.
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Which was what love was: unmotivated respect.
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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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You marvel at the economy and this choice of words. How many ways can you describe the sky and the moon? After Sylvia Plath, what can you say?
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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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A dead hydrangea is as intricate and lovely as one in bloom. Bleak sky is as seductive as sunshine, miniature orange trees without blossom or fruit are not defective they are that.
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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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There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race - scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct... it has a social function, racism.
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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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Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? The Lion or the Mouse? Poppy or the Snake?
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