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A man ain't nothing but a man. But a son? Well, now, that's somebody.

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
Well
Nothing
Men
Son
Somebody
Wells

More quotes by Toni Morrison

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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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I sometimes lose interest in the characters and get much more interested in the trees and animals.
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Hospitality is gold in this City you have to be clever to figure out how to be welcoming and defensive at the same time. When to love something and when to quit. If you don't know how, you can end up out of control or controlled by some outside thing like that hard case last winter.
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I don't work. I keep telling people I'm unemployed. And I don't wash dishes, and I don't wash clothes, and I don't clean my house. Somebody else does that.
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Isolation, you know, carries the seeds of its own destruction because as times change, other things seep in.
Toni Morrison
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If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.
Toni Morrison
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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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If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.
Toni Morrison
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The formula for creative writing in high school or college is write what you know.
Toni Morrison
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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.
Toni Morrison
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The best part of all, the absolutely most delicious part, is finishing it and then doing it over I rewrite a lot, over and over again, so that it looks like I never did.
Toni Morrison
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Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.
Toni Morrison
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I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.
Toni Morrison
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A dead hydrangea is as intricate and lovely as one in bloom. Bleak sky is as seductive as sunshine, miniature orange trees without blossom or fruit are not defective they are that.
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
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You rely on a sentence to say more than the denotation and the connotation you revel in the smoke that the words send up.
Toni Morrison
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Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this mission.
Toni Morrison
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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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Listen, baby, people do funny things. Specially us. The cards are stacked against us and just trying to stay in the game, stay alive and in the game, makes us do funny things. Things we can't help. Things that make us hurt one another. We don't even know why.
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.
Toni Morrison