Quote

The seeds of destruction lie in the definition of chosen-ness and can easily blossom into bigotry. It's not inevitable but it needs constant care to avoid.

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
Easily
Blossom
Destruction
Bigotry
Constant
Definition
Lying
Definitions
Care
Seeds
Needs
Inevitable
Chosen
Avoid
Ness

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Sometimes the names were humiliating, deliberately so. Somebody would pick out your flaw. If you were little, they would call you Shorty. And if you were angry, they would call you the Devil.
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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.
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I thought the whole world was like Lorain.
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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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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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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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Nelson Mandela is, for me, the single statesman in the world. The single statesman, in that literal sense, who is not solving all his problems with guns. It's truly unbelievable.
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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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You been gone too long, Sula. Not too long, but maybe too far.
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Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.
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I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway.
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There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race - scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct... it has a social function, racism.
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Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.
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Now he knew why he loved her so. Without ever leaving the ground, she could fly. 'There must be another one like you,' he whispered to her. 'There's got to be at least one more woman like you.
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Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.
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Our ancestors are an ever widening circle of hope.
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My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren't my children.
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This is really skin privilege, the ranking of color in terms of its closeness to white people or white-skinned people and its devaluation according to how dark one is and the impact that has on people who are dedicated to the privileges of certain levels of skin color.
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