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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.

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
Wouldn
Writer
Inspiration
Either
Write
Writing
Waited
Really
Compelled
Explain

More quotes by Toni Morrison

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The past is interesting to me because it's been dumbed down or flattened out, or academically nitpicked so you can't get any life out of it, you just get data.
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He leans over and takes her hand. With the other he touches her face. ‘You your best thing, Sethe. You are.’ His holding fingers are holding hers. ‘Me? Me?
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What's the world for you if you can't make it up the way you want it?
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Lonely, ain't it? Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else's. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain't that something? A secondhand lonely.
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We read about how Ajax and Achilles will die for each other, but very little about the friendship of women.
Toni Morrison
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Sometimes the names were humiliating, deliberately so. Somebody would pick out your flaw. If you were little, they would call you Shorty. And if you were angry, they would call you the Devil.
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Which was what love was: unmotivated respect.
Toni Morrison
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Unless carefree, mother love was a killer.
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For a long time I was convinced that the conflict between Jewish people and black people in this country was a media event.
Toni Morrison
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Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?
Toni Morrison
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Womanists is what black feminists used to call themselves. Very much so. They were not the same thing. And also the relationship with men. Historically, black women have always sheltered their men because they were out there, and they were the ones that were most likely to be killed.
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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
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Everything depends on knowing how much,” she said, and “Good is knowing when to stop.
Toni Morrison
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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
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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.
Toni Morrison
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All important things are hard.
Toni Morrison
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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.
Toni Morrison
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We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.
Toni Morrison
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Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.
Toni Morrison
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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.
Toni Morrison