Quote

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.

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
Dark
According
White
Skins
Devaluation
Certain
Privilege
Skinned
Really
Impact
Ranking
People
Terms
Closeness
Color
Privileges
Levels
Dedicated
Term
Skin

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The difference between that which is humane and that which is patriotic is a vital difference.
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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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The screams of a hurt woman were indistinguishable from everyday traffic.
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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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But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.
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Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It's not having no responsibilitie s it's choosing the ones you want.
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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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...the City is what they want it to be: thriftless, warm, scary and full of amiable strangers. No wonder they forget pebbly creeks and when they do not forget the sky completely think of it as a tiny piece of information about the time of day or night.
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Women's rights is not only an abstraction, a cause it is also a personal affair. It is not only about us it is also about me and you. Just the two of us.
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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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It would be ten years before they saw each other again, and their meeting would be thick with birds.
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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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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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Sweet, she thought. He must think I can't bear to hear him say it. That after all I have told him and after telling me how many feet I have, goodbye would break me to pieces. Ain't that sweet. So long, she murmured from the far side of the trees.
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Unless carefree, mother love was a killer.
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Home is memory, home is your history, home is where you work. Some people want to abandon it and become truly local. But the questions are all there.
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Black women are the touchstone by which all that is human can be measured.
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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.
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guileless and without vanity,we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our own skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness.
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I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer - its dust and lowering skies.
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