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I feel like today we always glorify the young, just-plucked-from-college writer. But it's much harder to start writing later, in middle age, struggling on a book around a full-time job and family.

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
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Middle
Glorify
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Struggling
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Later
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Family
Harder
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Always
Around
College
Time
Young
Struggle

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Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.
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My father saw two black men lynched on his street in Cartersville, as a child. And I think seeing two black businessmen - not vagrants - hanging from trees as a child was traumatic for him.
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I can't explain inspiration. A writer is either compelled to write or not. And if I waited for inspiration I wouldn't really be a writer.
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Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.
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For a long time I was convinced that the conflict between Jewish people and black people in this country was a media event.
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I know there's some poetry that sort of sounds like daisies, but most of the good poetry is also [political], you can feel the heartbeat it's about some situation that concerns human beings under duress. It's suggesting a solution, or just acknowledging that [the situation] exists. Art does that.
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I don't do the things other people call play.
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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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You looked at me then like you knew me, and I thought it really was Eden, and I couldn't take your eyes in because I was loving the hoof marks on your cheeks.
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If happiness is anticipation with certainty, we were happy.
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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.
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Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.
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A son ain't what a woman say. A son is what a man do.
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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.
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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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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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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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The screams of a hurt woman were indistinguishable from everyday traffic.
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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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Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.
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