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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

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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.
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I began to realize that this idea of the lighter the better and the darker the worse was really - had an impact on sororities, on friendships, on all sorts of things, and it was stunning to me.
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A man ain't nothing but a man. But a son? Well, now, that's somebody.
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The best part of all, the absolutely most delicious part, is finishing it and then doing it over I rewrite a lot, over and over again, so that it looks like I never did.
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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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We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.
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Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.
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Your life is already artful-waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.
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I feel like today we always glorify the young, just-plucked-from-college writer. But it's much harder to start writing later, in middle age, struggling on a book around a full-time job and family.
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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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Not knowing it was hard knowing it was harder
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A son ain't what a woman say. A son is what a man do.
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I know what every colored woman in this country is doing... Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I’m going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.
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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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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.
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And wouldn't you know he'd be a singing man.
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There is really nothing more to say - except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.
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Girl, I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me...my lonely is mine.
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Language can never 'pin down' slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity, is in its reach toward the ineffable.
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