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Our ancestors are an ever widening circle of hope.

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
Circles
Roots
Hope
Ever
Widening
Ancestors
Ancestor
Circle

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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.
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If happiness is anticipation with certainty, we were happy.
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The race thing is sort of a misnomer. It's just the human race, right? That's it. The rest of it, and racism, is socially constructed. Nobody is born racist, no one. What happens is other things that are usually based on power, money, feeling good about yourself, or bad about yourself, those things play into hating other people for whatever reason.
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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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Sifting daylight dissolves the memory, turns it into dust motes floating in light.
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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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Being able to laugh got me through.
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Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers.
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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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The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.
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Anything dead coming back to life hurts.
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The enemy is not men. The enemy is the concept of patriarchy, the concept of patriarchy as the way to run the world or do things.
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I dream a dream that dreams back at me.
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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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I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither.... So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.
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Every now and then she looked around for tangible evidence of his having ever been there. Where were the butterflies? the blueberries? the whistling reed? She could find nothing, for he had left nothing but his stunning absence.
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The theme you choose may change or simply elude you, but being your own story means you can always choose the tone. It also means that you can invent the language to say who are you and what you mean.
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I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway.
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Writing is really a way of thinking--not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.
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A friend gathers all the pieces and gives them back in the right order.
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