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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.

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
Also
Awe
Writing
Selection
Thinking
Reverence
Discovery
Meaning
Mystery
Magic
Order

More quotes by Toni Morrison

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What's interesting about writing is the invention, the creative thing. Writing about myself is a yawn.
Toni Morrison
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Unless carefree, mother love was a killer.
Toni Morrison
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A dead hydrangea is as intricate and lovely as one in bloom. Bleak sky is as seductive as sunshine, miniature orange trees without blossom or fruit are not defective they are that.
Toni Morrison
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I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer - its dust and lowering skies.
Toni Morrison
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There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.
Toni Morrison
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In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.
Toni Morrison
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Did you ever see the way the clouds love a mountain? They circle all around it sometimes you can't even see the mountain for the clouds. But you know what? ... The clouds never cover the head. His head pokes through, because the clouds let him they don't wrap him up. They let him keep his head high, free.
Toni Morrison
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You marvel at the economy and this choice of words. How many ways can you describe the sky and the moon? After Sylvia Plath, what can you say?
Toni Morrison
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And wouldn't you know he'd be a singing man.
Toni Morrison
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You have to be willing to think the unthinkable.
Toni Morrison
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You rely on a sentence to say more than the denotation and the connotation you revel in the smoke that the words send up.
Toni Morrison
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Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.
Toni Morrison
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I began to realize that this idea of the lighter the better and the darker the worse was really - had an impact on sororities, on friendships, on all sorts of things, and it was stunning to me.
Toni Morrison
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If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down.
Toni Morrison
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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.
Toni Morrison
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Pain. I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweettooth for it. Bolts of lightning, little rivulets of thunder. And I the eye of the storm.
Toni Morrison
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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.
Toni Morrison
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Isolation, you know, carries the seeds of its own destruction because as times change, other things seep in.
Toni Morrison
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Nobody loved her and she wouldn’t have liked it if they had, she considered love a serious disability.
Toni Morrison
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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.
Toni Morrison