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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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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
Way
Things
Men
World
Patriarchy
Concept
Concepts
Enemy
Running

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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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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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There is no civilization that did not begin with art, Whether it was drawing a line in the sand, painting a cave or dancing.
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Occasionally, as children, we might figure out how to call somebody a name, and they would figure out how to call us. But it wasn't - it was so light. It was so fluffy. I didn't really have a strong awareness of segregation and the separation of races until I left Lorain, Ohio.
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No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you.
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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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Think of anybody - Dostoevsky or Jane Austen - [their work] was always something that now we would call political. So I don't see those separations too much, between what is artistic and what is political. Maybe in painting... no, I don't even believe that.
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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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The habit of getting up early, which I had formed when the children were young, now became my choice. I am not very bright or very witty or very inventive after the sun goes down.
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Sweet, she thought. He must think I can't bear to hear him say it. That after all I have told him and after telling me how many feet I have, goodbye would break me to pieces. Ain't that sweet. So long, she murmured from the far side of the trees.
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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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A man ain't nothing but a man. But a son? Well, now, that's somebody.
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What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.
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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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My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren't my children.
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You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question.
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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.
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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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Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.
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the hopelessness that comes from knowing too little and feeling too much (so brittle, so dry he is in danger of the reverse: feeling nothing and knowing everything)
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