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The best part of all, the absolutely most delicious part, is finishing it and then doing it over I rewrite a lot, over and over again, so that it looks like I never did.
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
Part
Best
Looks
Never
Like
Rewrite
Finishing
Delicious
Absolutely
More quotes by Toni Morrison
I think women dwell quite a bit on the duress under which they work, on how hard it is just to do it at all. We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped creative work in there between the domestic chores and obligations. I'm not sure we deserve such big A-pluses for all that.
Toni Morrison
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)
Toni Morrison
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.
Toni Morrison
Think of anybody - Dostoevsky or Jane Austen - [their work] was always something that now we would call political. So I don't see those separations too much, between what is artistic and what is political. Maybe in painting... no, I don't even believe that.
Toni Morrison
If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.
Toni Morrison
An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.
Toni Morrison
Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers - not the defined.
Toni Morrison
I'm just trying to look at something without blinking, to see what it is like, or it could have been like, and how that had something to do with the way we live now. Novels are always inquiries for me.
Toni Morrison
Anything I have ever learned of any consequence, I have learned from Black people. I have never been bored by any Black person, ever.
Toni Morrison
The screams of a hurt woman were indistinguishable from everyday traffic.
Toni Morrison
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.
Toni Morrison
Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.
Toni Morrison
A friend gathers all the pieces and gives them back in the right order.
Toni Morrison
I tell my students one of the most important things they need to know is when they are at their best, creatively. They need to ask themselves, What does the ideal room look like? Is there music? Is there silence? Is there chaos outside or is there serenity outside? What do I need in order to release my imagination?
Toni Morrison
Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.
Toni Morrison
There is really nothing more to say - except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.
Toni Morrison
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.
Toni Morrison
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.
Toni Morrison
They encouraged you to put some of your weight in their hands and soon as you felt how light and lovely it was, they studied your scars and tribulations.
Toni Morrison
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.
Toni Morrison