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Black women are the touchstone by which all that is human can be measured.

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
Measured
Black
Women
Human
Humans
Touchstone
Touchstones

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they ran in the sunlight, creating their own breeze which pressed their dresses into their damp skin. Reaching a kind of square of four locked trees which promised cooling they flung themselves into the shade to taste their lip sweat and contemplate the wildness that had come upon them so suddenly
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Home is memory, home is your history, home is where you work. Some people want to abandon it and become truly local. But the questions are all there.
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The seeds of destruction lie in the definition of chosen-ness and can easily blossom into bigotry. It's not inevitable but it needs constant care to avoid.
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Beauty was not simply something to behold it was something one could do.
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The screams of a hurt woman were indistinguishable from everyday traffic.
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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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When you stiffen, you know that whatever you stiffen about is very important. The stuff is important, the fear itself is information.
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Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It's not having no responsibilitie s it's choosing the ones you want.
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Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs—all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured
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Usually I try to be there by six. Everything has been taken off the walls so that there's nothing to arrest my sight. On the bed I have Roget's Thesaurus, a dictionary, a Bible, and a deck of playing cards.
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And wouldn't you know he'd be a singing man.
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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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What's interesting about writing is the invention, the creative thing. Writing about myself is a yawn.
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Hospitality is gold in this City you have to be clever to figure out how to be welcoming and defensive at the same time. When to love something and when to quit. If you don't know how, you can end up out of control or controlled by some outside thing like that hard case last winter.
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We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.
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You been gone too long, Sula. Not too long, but maybe too far.
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Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.
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At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.
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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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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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