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There is an incredible amount of magic and feistiness in black men that nobody has been able to wipe out. But everybody has tried.

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
Men
Incredible
Tried
Magic
Nobody
Amount
Everybody
Black
Able
Wipe

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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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I tell my students one of the most important things they need to know is when they are at their best, creatively. They need to ask themselves, What does the ideal room look like? Is there music? Is there silence? Is there chaos outside or is there serenity outside? What do I need in order to release my imagination?
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Beauty was not simply something to behold it was something one could do.
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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.
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A friend gathers all the pieces and gives them back in the right order.
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Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not, permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.
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Her mind traveled crooked streets and aimless goat paths, arriving sometimes at profundity, other times at the revelations of a three-year-old. Throughout this fresh, if common, pursuit of knowledge, one conviction crowned her efforts: ...she knew there was nothing to fear.
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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.
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Women's rights is not only an abstraction, a cause it is also a personal affair. It is not only about us it is also about me and you. Just the two of us.
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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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Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.
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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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Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.
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A son ain't what a woman say. A son is what a man do.
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Now what? All the battles feminists won about not being a sex object, not being evaluated based on these things, that now other generations are wallowing in, the extremes they go to, to look sexually attractive? It's stunning how things that one fought desperately for are just being tossed aside with aplomb.
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The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers.
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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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Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.
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Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers.
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As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer.
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