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Being able to laugh got me through.
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
Laugh
Laughing
Able
More quotes by Toni Morrison
Oppressive language does more than represent violence it is violence does more than represent the limits of knowledge it limits knowledge.
Toni Morrison
Much handled things are always soft(27).
Toni Morrison
Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? The Lion or the Mouse? Poppy or the Snake?
Toni Morrison
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.
Toni Morrison
What do you say? There really are no words for that. There really aren't. Somebody tries to say, 'I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.' People say that to me. There's no language for it. Sorry doesn't do it. I think you should just hug people and mop their floor or something.
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
In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.
Toni Morrison
Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth.
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
Jealousy we understood and thought natural... But envy was a strange, new feeling for us. And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us.
Toni Morrison
Every now and then she looked around for tangible evidence of his having ever been there. Where were the butterflies? the blueberries? the whistling reed? She could find nothing, for he had left nothing but his stunning absence.
Toni Morrison
I don't think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It's perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man.
Toni Morrison
Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?
Toni Morrison
I began to realize that this idea of the lighter the better and the darker the worse was really - had an impact on sororities, on friendships, on all sorts of things, and it was stunning to me.
Toni Morrison
The enemy is not men. The enemy is the concept of patriarchy, the concept of patriarchy as the way to run the world or do things.
Toni Morrison
In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it's nothing else but color.
Toni Morrison
Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.
Toni Morrison
Nelson Mandela is, for me, the single statesman in the world. The single statesman, in that literal sense, who is not solving all his problems with guns. It's truly unbelievable.
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
...the City is what they want it to be: thriftless, warm, scary and full of amiable strangers. No wonder they forget pebbly creeks and when they do not forget the sky completely think of it as a tiny piece of information about the time of day or night.
Toni Morrison