Quote

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.

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
Thing
Constructs
Racism
None
Function
Race
Social
Human
Scientifically
Humans
Construct

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For a long time I was convinced that the conflict between Jewish people and black people in this country was a media event.
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I don't want you to write about what you know, because you don't know anything. I don't want to hear about your boyfriend or your grandma... I'm getting a little tired of 'my life story as fiction'. Please don't tell me about your little life - is there nothing larger? More important?
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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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Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers.
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Did you ever see the way the clouds love a mountain? They circle all around it sometimes you can't even see the mountain for the clouds. But you know what? ... The clouds never cover the head. His head pokes through, because the clouds let him they don't wrap him up. They let him keep his head high, free.
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He said, 'Always. Always.
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What I'm doing ain't about hating White people. It's about loving us.
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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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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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Perhaps that's what all human relationships boiled down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?
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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.
Toni Morrison
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A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves - a special kind of double.
Toni Morrison
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Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.
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How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.
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And wouldn't you know he'd be a singing man.
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There is an incredible amount of magic and feistiness in black men that nobody has been able to wipe out. But everybody has tried.
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I sang O Holy Night in a school choir. My mother came and listened to me and complimented me. So that was the high point. I cannot sing a note.
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Listen, baby, people do funny things. Specially us. The cards are stacked against us and just trying to stay in the game, stay alive and in the game, makes us do funny things. Things we can't help. Things that make us hurt one another. We don't even know why.
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In Ohio seasons are theatrical. Each one enters like a prima donna, convinced its performance is the reason the world has people in it.
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Make up a story... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.
Toni Morrison