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Usually I try to be there by six. Everything has been taken off the walls so that there's nothing to arrest my sight. On the bed I have Roget's Thesaurus, a dictionary, a Bible, and a deck of playing cards.

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
Everything
Six
Nothing
Bed
Writing
Bible
Thesaurus
Trying
Sight
Arrest
Usually
Deck
Wall
Dictionary
Playing
Walls
Taken
Cards

More quotes by Toni Morrison

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She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it's there, because it can't hurt, and because what difference does it make?
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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
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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.
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Beauty was not simply something to behold it was something one could do.
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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.
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Unless carefree, mother love was a killer.
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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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The body is ready to have babies. Nature wants it done then, when the body can handle it, not after 40, when the income can handle it.
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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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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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I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life.
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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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Your life is already artful-waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.
Toni Morrison
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It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love ... You can't own a human being.
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The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.
Toni Morrison
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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.
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If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down.
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Our ancestors are an ever widening circle of hope.
Toni Morrison
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One of my kids was born in 1968. There were going to be political difficulties, but they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to.
Toni Morrison
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I know there's some poetry that sort of sounds like daisies, but most of the good poetry is also [political], you can feel the heartbeat it's about some situation that concerns human beings under duress. It's suggesting a solution, or just acknowledging that [the situation] exists. Art does that.
Toni Morrison