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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
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
Victim
Bear
Fruit
Bears
Acquiesce
Land
Volition
Certain
Kills
Live
Nurture
Right
Seeds
More quotes by Toni Morrison
I know what every colored woman in this country is doing... Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I’m going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.
Toni Morrison
My metaphor is that evil always has a top hat and a cape, and goodness is over there in the corner. For me it's just too easy, if you hate your country or your wife, so you kill them. You can't think through that, you can't feel through that, you can't do the work. And now we have guns. Solution? I don't think so.
Toni Morrison
Black women have always been friends. I mean, if you didn't have each other you had nothing.
Toni Morrison
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
It was my father who could do no wrong. So I didn't think of it as, oh, look, my father's a violent man.
Toni Morrison
Anything I have ever learned of any consequence, I have learned from Black people. I have never been bored by any Black person, ever.
Toni Morrison
The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.
Toni Morrison
Political doesn't necessarily mean you have an agenda.
Toni Morrison
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.
Toni Morrison
they ran in the sunlight, creating their own breeze which pressed their dresses into their damp skin. Reaching a kind of square of four locked trees which promised cooling they flung themselves into the shade to taste their lip sweat and contemplate the wildness that had come upon them so suddenly
Toni Morrison
Home is memory, home is your history, home is where you work. Some people want to abandon it and become truly local. But the questions are all there.
Toni Morrison
I can't explain inspiration. A writer is either compelled to write or not. And if I waited for inspiration I wouldn't really be a writer.
Toni Morrison
Most of the really good literature I've read in my life was political, meaning it was important - about something going on in the history of the world - or contemporary.
Toni Morrison
Occasionally, as children, we might figure out how to call somebody a name, and they would figure out how to call us. But it wasn't - it was so light. It was so fluffy. I didn't really have a strong awareness of segregation and the separation of races until I left Lorain, Ohio.
Toni Morrison
Beauty was not simply something to behold it was something one could do.
Toni Morrison
You looked at me then like you knew me, and I thought it really was Eden, and I couldn't take your eyes in because I was loving the hoof marks on your cheeks.
Toni Morrison
Unless carefree, mother love was a killer.
Toni Morrison
If you can't count, they can cheat you. If you can't read, they can beat you.
Toni Morrison
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
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.
Toni Morrison
