Quote

An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.

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
Kind
Sin
Absorbing
Men
Therefore
Godly
Cause
Foul
Untrustworthy
Causes
Sins
Rows
Fall
Innocence
Wilt
Live
Innocent
Vines
Without
Angel
Trumpets
Even
Air
Inhuman

More quotes by Toni Morrison

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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.
Toni Morrison
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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
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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.
Toni Morrison
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Racism will disappear when it's no longer profitable, and no longer psychologically useful. And when that happens, it'll be gone. But at the moment, people make a lot of money off of it, pro and con.
Toni Morrison
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Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.
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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 think women dwell quite a bit on the duress under which they work, on how hard it is just to do it at all. We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped creative work in there between the domestic chores and obligations. I'm not sure we deserve such big A-pluses for all that.
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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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Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It's not having no responsibilitie s it's choosing the ones you want.
Toni Morrison
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He said, 'Always. Always.
Toni Morrison
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There's a difference between writing for a living and writing for life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises.... If you write for life, you'll work hard you'll do what's honest, not what pays
Toni Morrison
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Beauty was not simply something to behold it was something one could do.
Toni Morrison
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I want to discourage you from choosing anything or making any decision simply because it is safe. Things of value seldom are
Toni Morrison
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I know it's trash: just another story made up to scare wicked females and correct unruly children. But it's all I have. I know I need something else. Something better. Like a story that shows how brazen women can take a good man down. I can hum to that.
Toni Morrison
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The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.
Toni Morrison
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Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.
Toni Morrison
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The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.
Toni Morrison
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I don't want you to write about what you know, because you don't know anything. I don't want to hear about your boyfriend or your grandma... I'm getting a little tired of 'my life story as fiction'. Please don't tell me about your little life - is there nothing larger? More important?
Toni Morrison
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Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.
Toni Morrison
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Nobody loved her and she wouldn’t have liked it if they had, she considered love a serious disability.
Toni Morrison