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Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face you are me.

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
Beloved
Mom
Daughter
Literature
Face
Faces
Sister

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Not knowing it was hard knowing it was harder
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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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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.
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He wants to put his story next to hers.
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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
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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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I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.
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We read about how Ajax and Achilles will die for each other, but very little about the friendship of women.
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Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers - not the defined.
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Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.
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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.
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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 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.
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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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Isolation, you know, carries the seeds of its own destruction because as times change, other things seep in.
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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 theme you choose may change or simply elude you, but being your own story means you can always choose the tone. It also means that you can invent the language to say who are you and what you mean.
Toni Morrison
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Sunk in the grass of an empty lot on a spring Saturday, I split the stems of milkweed and thought about ants and peach pits and death and where the world went when I closed my eyes.
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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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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. No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens — that letting go — you let go because you can.
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