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There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

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
Place
Civilization
Self
Room
Need
Rooms
Needs
Silence
Writing
Language
Civilizations
Time
Fear
Heal
Speak
Pity
Write
Despair

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As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer.
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Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.
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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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The isolation, the separateness, is always a part of any utopia.
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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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Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? The Lion or the Mouse? Poppy or the Snake?
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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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A dream is just a nightmare with lipstick.
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Maybe [I care about language] because I'm an editor, maybe because I'm picky, but it's all we got, don't shrink it. Don't dumb it out, make it little.
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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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Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another - physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.
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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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Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers - not the defined.
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He wants to put his story next to hers.
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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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...when the little boy discovered, at four, the same thing Mr. Smith had learned earlier -- that only birds and planes could fly -- he lost all interest in himself.
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I don't think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It's perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man.
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Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.
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What's interesting about writing is the invention, the creative thing. Writing about myself is a yawn.
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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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