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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.

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
Name
Names
Dies
Black
Noted
Hang
Remembered
Unless

More quotes by Toni Morrison

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Black women are the touchstone by which all that is human can be measured.
Toni Morrison
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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.
Toni Morrison
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If you can't count, they can cheat you. If you can't read, they can beat you.
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
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Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not, permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.
Toni Morrison
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Pain. I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweettooth for it. Bolts of lightning, little rivulets of thunder. And I the eye of the storm.
Toni Morrison
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I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me.
Toni Morrison
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Misery colored by the greens and blues in my mother's voice took away all the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet.
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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Being able to laugh got me through.
Toni Morrison
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I have a lot of respect for readers because I'm a reader. That's how I got into writing.
Toni Morrison
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When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.
Toni Morrison
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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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I'm just trying to look at something without blinking, to see what it is like, or it could have been like, and how that had something to do with the way we live now. Novels are always inquiries for me.
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 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.
Toni Morrison
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Unpersecuted, unjailed, unharrassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world's resources.
Toni Morrison
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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.
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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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.
Toni Morrison