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Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not, permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.

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
Knowledge
Exchange
Language
Mastery
Cannot
Typical
Ideas
Permit
Theistic
Encourage
Policing
Racist
Sexist
Mutual
Sexism
Racism
Languages

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In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it's nothing else but color.
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The formula for creative writing in high school or college is write what you know.
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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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I know what every colored woman in this country is doing... Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I’m going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.
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Racism will disappear when it's no longer profitable, and no longer psychologically useful. And when that happens, it'll be gone. But at the moment, people make a lot of money off of it, pro and con.
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Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth.
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When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world?
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What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?
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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.
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I don't work. I keep telling people I'm unemployed. And I don't wash dishes, and I don't wash clothes, and I don't clean my house. Somebody else does that.
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...the City is what they want it to be: thriftless, warm, scary and full of amiable strangers. No wonder they forget pebbly creeks and when they do not forget the sky completely think of it as a tiny piece of information about the time of day or night.
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When you know your name, you should hang on to it, for unless it is noted down and remembered, it will die when you do.
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Life that crawled, life that slunk and crept and never closed its eyes. Life that burrowed and scurried, and life so still it was indistinguishable from the ivy stems on which it lay. Birth, life, and death - each took place on the hidden side of a leaf.
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The screams of a hurt woman were indistinguishable from everyday traffic.
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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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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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Beauty was not simply something to behold it was something one could do.
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My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren't my children.
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Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face you are me.
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Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.
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