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Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.

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
Protect
Alone
Names
Language
Things
Protects
Meditation

More quotes by 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.
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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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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.
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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.
Toni Morrison
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What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?
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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.
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We read about how Ajax and Achilles will die for each other, but very little about the friendship of women.
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Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs—all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured
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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
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In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.
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I tell my students there is such a thing as 'writer's block,' and they should respect it. You shouldn't write through it. It's blocked because it ought to be blocked, because you haven't got it right now.
Toni Morrison
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The body is ready to have babies. Nature wants it done then, when the body can handle it, not after 40, when the income can handle it.
Toni Morrison
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He wants to put his story next to hers.
Toni Morrison
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I thought the whole world was like Lorain.
Toni Morrison
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I'm not entangled in shaping my work according to other people's views of how I should have done it.
Toni Morrison
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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.
Toni Morrison
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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
Toni Morrison
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It seems to me everything Shakespeare did was political.
Toni Morrison
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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.
Toni Morrison
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Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.
Toni Morrison