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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
Always
Around
College
Time
Young
Struggle
Like
Today
Full
Plucked
Book
Middle
Glorify
Feel
Start
Struggling
Feels
Age
Later
Writing
Family
Harder
Much
Jobs
Writer

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Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live
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Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth.
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What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?
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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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I don't do the things other people call play.
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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 habit of getting up early, which I had formed when the children were young, now became my choice. I am not very bright or very witty or very inventive after the sun goes down.
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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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If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.
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Oppressive language does more than represent violence it is violence does more than represent the limits of knowledge it limits knowledge.
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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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No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you.
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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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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?
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I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.
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Your life is already artful-waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.
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As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer.
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Our ancestors are an ever widening circle of hope.
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Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers.
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Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.
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