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The concept of physical beauty as a virtue is one of the dumbest, most pernicious and destructive ideas of the Western world, and we should have nothing to do with it.

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
Nothing
Destructive
World
Concept
Concepts
Western
Physical
Virtue
Beauty
Dumbest
Ideas
Pernicious

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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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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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If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic....Authors arrive at text and subtext in thousands of ways, learning each time they begin anew how to recognize a valuable idea and how to reader the texture that accompanies, reveals or displays it to its best advantage.
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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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The difference between that which is humane and that which is patriotic is a vital difference.
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Whatever happens, whether you get rich or stay poor, ruin your health or live to old age, you always end up back where you started: hungry for the one thing everybody loses - young loving.
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The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.
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You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone.
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Sometimes the names were humiliating, deliberately so. Somebody would pick out your flaw. If you were little, they would call you Shorty. And if you were angry, they would call you the Devil.
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A friend gathers all the pieces and gives them back in the right order.
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There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race - scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct... it has a social function, racism.
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Love is never any better than the lover.
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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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We're all surrounded by what I call faux language, fake language of commerce, of news media.
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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.
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Word-work is sublime... because it is generative it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference-the way in which we are like no other life. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
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A dream is just a nightmare with lipstick.
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Evil is so seductive. It needs to grind you up and make you its slave.
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I know there's some poetry that sort of sounds like daisies, but most of the good poetry is also [political], you can feel the heartbeat it's about some situation that concerns human beings under duress. It's suggesting a solution, or just acknowledging that [the situation] exists. Art does that.
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