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The difference between that which is humane and that which is patriotic is a vital difference.

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
Patriotic
Vital
Difference
Differences
Humane

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Black women have always been friends. I mean, if you didn't have each other you had nothing.
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The function of freedom is to free someone else.
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You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone.
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they ran in the sunlight, creating their own breeze which pressed their dresses into their damp skin. Reaching a kind of square of four locked trees which promised cooling they flung themselves into the shade to taste their lip sweat and contemplate the wildness that had come upon them so suddenly
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To get to a place where you could love anything you chose--not to need permission for desire--well now _that_ was freedom.
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Did you ever see the way the clouds love a mountain? They circle all around it sometimes you can't even see the mountain for the clouds. But you know what? ... The clouds never cover the head. His head pokes through, because the clouds let him they don't wrap him up. They let him keep his head high, free.
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Anything I have ever learned of any consequence, I have learned from Black people. I have never been bored by any Black person, ever.
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What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?
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Her mind traveled crooked streets and aimless goat paths, arriving sometimes at profundity, other times at the revelations of a three-year-old. Throughout this fresh, if common, pursuit of knowledge, one conviction crowned her efforts: ...she knew there was nothing to fear.
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Unless carefree, mother love was a killer.
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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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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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Sunk in the grass of an empty lot on a spring Saturday, I split the stems of milkweed and thought about ants and peach pits and death and where the world went when I closed my eyes.
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There is an incredible amount of magic and feistiness in black men that nobody has been able to wipe out. But everybody has tried.
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I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.
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It had been the longest time since she had had a rib-scraping laugh. She had forgotten how deep and down it could be. So different from the miscellaneous giggles and smiles she had learned to be content with these past few years.
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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.
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Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.
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A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves - a special kind of double.
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Can't nothing heal without pain, you know.
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