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The screams of a hurt woman were indistinguishable from everyday traffic.

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
Indistinguishable
Screams
Traffic
Scream
Everyday
Hurt
Woman

More quotes by 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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Racism will disappear when it's no longer profitable, and no longer psychologically useful. And when that happens, it'll be gone. But at the moment, people make a lot of money off of it, pro and con.
Toni Morrison
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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.
Toni Morrison
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I want to feel what I feel. What's mine. Even if it's not happiness, whatever that means. Because you're all you've got.
Toni Morrison
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What I'm doing ain't about hating White people. It's about loving us.
Toni Morrison
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A bestseller is a book that non-book buyers buy
Toni Morrison
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There's a difference between writing for a living and writing for life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises.... If you write for life, you'll work hard you'll do what's honest, not what pays
Toni Morrison
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If happiness is anticipation with certainty, we were happy.
Toni Morrison
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Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? The Lion or the Mouse? Poppy or the Snake?
Toni Morrison
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I guess I'm depressed. I don't know. I can't explain it. Part of it is the irritability of being 84, and part of it is being not as physically strong as I once was. And part of it is my misunderstanding, I think, of what's going on in the world.
Toni Morrison
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My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren't my children.
Toni Morrison
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If you can't count, they can cheat you. If you can't read, they can beat you.
Toni Morrison
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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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The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.
Toni Morrison
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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.
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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Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.
Toni Morrison
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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.
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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No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you.
Toni Morrison