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

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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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In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it's nothing else but color.
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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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It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love ... You can't own a human being.
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How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.
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Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?
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The unflattering reviews are painful for short periods of time the badly written ones are deeply, deeply insulting. That reviewer took no time to really read the book.
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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.
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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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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
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If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up.
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Whatever happens, whether you get rich or stay poor, ruin your health or live to old age, you always end up back where you started: hungry for the one thing everybody loses - young loving.
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In Ohio seasons are theatrical. Each one enters like a prima donna, convinced its performance is the reason the world has people in it.
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[Obama is ] creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom . . . [He is] the man for this time.
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Maybe [I care about language] because I'm an editor, maybe because I'm picky, but it's all we got, don't shrink it. Don't dumb it out, make it little.
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I sometimes lose interest in the characters and get much more interested in the trees and animals.
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I don't work. I keep telling people I'm unemployed. And I don't wash dishes, and I don't wash clothes, and I don't clean my house. Somebody else does that.
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It would be ten years before they saw each other again, and their meeting would be thick with birds.
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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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Make up a story... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.
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