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You have to be willing to think the unthinkable.

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
Unthinkable
Willing
Think
Thinking

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He said, 'Always. Always.
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Word-work is sublime... because it is generative it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference-the way in which we are like no other life. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
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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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Intimacy is extremely important to me and I want it to be extremely important to the readers.
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It was becoming a habit-this concentration on things behind him. Almost as though there were no future to be had. *Milkman*
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The language must be careful and must appear effortless. It must not sweat. It must suggest and be provocative at the same time.
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What's interesting about writing is the invention, the creative thing. Writing about myself is a yawn.
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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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There is really nothing more to say - except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.
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I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.
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Sifting daylight dissolves the memory, turns it into dust motes floating in light.
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I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me.
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At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.
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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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I don't think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It's perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man.
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Which was what love was: unmotivated respect.
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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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Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.
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Isolation, you know, carries the seeds of its own destruction because as times change, other things seep in.
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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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