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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
Alone
Names
Language
Things
Protects
Meditation
Protect

More quotes by Toni Morrison

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My father saw two black men lynched on his street in Cartersville, as a child. And I think seeing two black businessmen - not vagrants - hanging from trees as a child was traumatic for him.
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If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.
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A bestseller is a book that non-book buyers buy
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Evil is just sort of ultimately boring. The good thing is just complicated. It's more provocative to me and more stimulating to me.
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Race is the least reliable information you can have about someone. It's real information, but it tells you next to nothing.
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Black women are the touchstone by which all that is human can be measured.
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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.
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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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I don't do the things other people call play.
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When a child walks in the room, your child or anybody else’s child, do your eyes light up? That’s what they’re looking for.
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We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.
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When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world?
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My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren't my children.
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The function of freedom is to free someone else.
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Political doesn't necessarily mean you have an agenda.
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Her mind traveled crooked streets and aimless goat paths, arriving sometimes at profundity, other times at the revelations of a three-year-old. Throughout this fresh, if common, pursuit of knowledge, one conviction crowned her efforts: ...she knew there was nothing to fear.
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Anything I have ever learned of any consequence, I have learned from Black people. I have never been bored by any Black person, ever.
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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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You looked at me then like you knew me, and I thought it really was Eden, and I couldn't take your eyes in because I was loving the hoof marks on your cheeks.
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The race thing is sort of a misnomer. It's just the human race, right? That's it. The rest of it, and racism, is socially constructed. Nobody is born racist, no one. What happens is other things that are usually based on power, money, feeling good about yourself, or bad about yourself, those things play into hating other people for whatever reason.
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