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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
Differences
Humane
Patriotic
Vital
Difference

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A dream is just a nightmare with lipstick.
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I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither.... So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.
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The formula for creative writing in high school or college is write what you know.
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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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Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers - not the defined.
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Maybe [I care about language] because I'm an editor, maybe because I'm picky, but it's all we got, don't shrink it. Don't dumb it out, make it little.
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I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway.
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A son ain't what a woman say. A son is what a man do.
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How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.
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It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love ... You can't own a human being.
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Oppressive language does more than represent violence it is violence does more than represent the limits of knowledge it limits knowledge.
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My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren't my children.
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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.
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We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.
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A friend gathers all the pieces and gives them back in the right order.
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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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Jealousy we understood and thought natural... But envy was a strange, new feeling for us. And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us.
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If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.
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Can't nothing heal without pain, you know.
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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.
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