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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
Language
Things
Protects
Meditation
Protect
Alone
Names
More quotes by Toni Morrison
You marvel at the economy and this choice of words. How many ways can you describe the sky and the moon? After Sylvia Plath, what can you say?
Toni Morrison
What's interesting about writing is the invention, the creative thing. Writing about myself is a yawn.
Toni Morrison
If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.
Toni Morrison
I thought the whole world was like Lorain.
Toni Morrison
Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this mission.
Toni Morrison
Womanists is what black feminists used to call themselves. Very much so. They were not the same thing. And also the relationship with men. Historically, black women have always sheltered their men because they were out there, and they were the ones that were most likely to be killed.
Toni Morrison
No gasp at a miracle that is truly miraculous because the magic lies in the fact that you knew it was there for you all along.
Toni Morrison
All important things are hard.
Toni Morrison
I tell my students one of the most important things they need to know is when they are at their best, creatively. They need to ask themselves, What does the ideal room look like? Is there music? Is there silence? Is there chaos outside or is there serenity outside? What do I need in order to release my imagination?
Toni Morrison
She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it's there, because it can't hurt, and because what difference does it make?
Toni Morrison
An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.
Toni Morrison
This word LOVE - discredited, clicheed - can be restored and love, the instinct, the impulse to care for somebody in the hope that somebody will care for you - plus our language, the language, a language - is about all we have. With everything else going on, this is what makes us, what keeps us human.
Toni Morrison
If you can't count, they can cheat you. If you can't read, they can beat you.
Toni Morrison
Black women have always been friends. I mean, if you didn't have each other you had nothing.
Toni Morrison
Oppressive language does more than represent violence it is violence does more than represent the limits of knowledge it limits knowledge.
Toni Morrison
When you know your name, you should hang on to it, for unless it is noted down and remembered, it will die when you do.
Toni Morrison
My metaphor is that evil always has a top hat and a cape, and goodness is over there in the corner. For me it's just too easy, if you hate your country or your wife, so you kill them. You can't think through that, you can't feel through that, you can't do the work. And now we have guns. Solution? I don't think so.
Toni Morrison
Not knowing it was hard knowing it was harder
Toni Morrison
I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life.
Toni Morrison
You been gone too long, Sula. Not too long, but maybe too far.
Toni Morrison
