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How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.

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
Happiness
Wish
Human
Exquisitely
Humans
Thin
Trying
Permanent
Became
Achieve
Imagination

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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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When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world?
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At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.
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Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you'd have a little love left over for the next one.
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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.
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You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question.
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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 isolation, the separateness, is always a part of any utopia.
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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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Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs—all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured
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Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.
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I don't do the things other people call play.
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Language can never 'pin down' slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity, is in its reach toward the ineffable.
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Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?
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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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Race is the least reliable information you can have about someone. It's real information, but it tells you next to nothing.
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We're all surrounded by what I call faux language, fake language of commerce, of news media.
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For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone the flowers appear on the earth the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.
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Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth.
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