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The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers.

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
Possible
Vitality
Ability
Speakers
Lying
Imagined
Language
Readers
Lives
Actual
Writers
Lies
Reader

More quotes by Toni Morrison

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Love it, love it and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.
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We're all surrounded by what I call faux language, fake language of commerce, of news media.
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The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.
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What do you say? There really are no words for that. There really aren't. Somebody tries to say, 'I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.' People say that to me. There's no language for it. Sorry doesn't do it. I think you should just hug people and mop their floor or something.
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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.
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I can't explain inspiration. A writer is either compelled to write or not. And if I waited for inspiration I wouldn't really be a writer.
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The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.
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Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.
Toni Morrison
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Nobody loved her and she wouldn’t have liked it if they had, she considered love a serious disability.
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Most of the really good literature I've read in my life was political, meaning it was important - about something going on in the history of the world - or contemporary.
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I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.
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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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Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? The Lion or the Mouse? Poppy or the Snake?
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Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.
Toni Morrison
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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.
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Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth.
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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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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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the hopelessness that comes from knowing too little and feeling too much (so brittle, so dry he is in danger of the reverse: feeling nothing and knowing everything)
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When you stiffen, you know that whatever you stiffen about is very important. The stuff is important, the fear itself is information.
Toni Morrison