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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.

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
Whatever
Fear
Stuff
Important
Stiffen
Information

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Lonely, ain't it? Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else's. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain't that something? A secondhand lonely.
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What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.
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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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guileless and without vanity,we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our own skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness.
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Love is never any better than the lover.
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It seems to me everything Shakespeare did was political.
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I thought the whole world was like Lorain.
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If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.
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The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.
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He wants to put his story next to hers.
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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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Jealousy we understood and thought natural... But envy was a strange, new feeling for us. And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us.
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For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction.
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She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it's there, because it can't hurt, and because what difference does it make?
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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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Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.
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Not knowing it was hard knowing it was harder
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I sang O Holy Night in a school choir. My mother came and listened to me and complimented me. So that was the high point. I cannot sing a note.
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The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one.
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I'm not entangled in shaping my work according to other people's views of how I should have done it.
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