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I want to feel what I feel. What's mine. Even if it's not happiness, whatever that means. Because you're all you've got.

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
Whatever
Happiness
Means
Feel
Feels
Mean
Even
Mines
Mine

More quotes by Toni Morrison

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This word LOVE - discredited, clicheed - can be restored and love, the instinct, the impulse to care for somebody in the hope that somebody will care for you - plus our language, the language, a language - is about all we have. With everything else going on, this is what makes us, what keeps us human.
Toni Morrison
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You have to be willing to think the unthinkable.
Toni Morrison
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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.
Toni Morrison
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Your life is already artful-waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.
Toni Morrison
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Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.
Toni Morrison
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The seeds of destruction lie in the definition of chosen-ness and can easily blossom into bigotry. It's not inevitable but it needs constant care to avoid.
Toni Morrison
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I guess I'm depressed. I don't know. I can't explain it. Part of it is the irritability of being 84, and part of it is being not as physically strong as I once was. And part of it is my misunderstanding, I think, of what's going on in the world.
Toni Morrison
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An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.
Toni Morrison
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Most of our lives are spent in little towns, little towns all throughout the country. That's where we live. And that's where the juices come from and that's where we made it, not made it in terms of success but made who we are.
Toni Morrison
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I like marriage. The idea.
Toni Morrison
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Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this mission.
Toni Morrison
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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.
Toni Morrison
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The best part of all, the absolutely most delicious part, is finishing it and then doing it over I rewrite a lot, over and over again, so that it looks like I never did.
Toni Morrison
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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.
Toni Morrison
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Gimme hate, Lord,” he whimpered. “I’ll take hate any day. But don’t give me love. I can’t take no more love, Lord. I can’t carry it...It’s too heavy. Jesus, you know, you know all about it. Ain’t it heavy? Jesus? Ain’t love heavy?
Toni Morrison
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It was becoming a habit-this concentration on things behind him. Almost as though there were no future to be had. *Milkman*
Toni Morrison
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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.
Toni Morrison
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Political doesn't necessarily mean you have an agenda.
Toni Morrison
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Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It's not having no responsibilitie s it's choosing the ones you want.
Toni Morrison
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I know there's some poetry that sort of sounds like daisies, but most of the good poetry is also [political], you can feel the heartbeat it's about some situation that concerns human beings under duress. It's suggesting a solution, or just acknowledging that [the situation] exists. Art does that.
Toni Morrison