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It was my father who could do no wrong. So I didn't think of it as, oh, look, my father's a violent man.

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
Think
Thinking
Violent
Wrong
Father
Didn
Look
Looks
Men

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A dream is just a nightmare with lipstick.
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Being able to laugh got me through.
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Hospitality is gold in this City you have to be clever to figure out how to be welcoming and defensive at the same time. When to love something and when to quit. If you don't know how, you can end up out of control or controlled by some outside thing like that hard case last winter.
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the hopelessness that comes from knowing too little and feeling too much (so brittle, so dry he is in danger of the reverse: feeling nothing and knowing everything)
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I think women dwell quite a bit on the duress under which they work, on how hard it is just to do it at all. We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped creative work in there between the domestic chores and obligations. I'm not sure we deserve such big A-pluses for all that.
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Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.
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I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither.... So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.
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Political doesn't necessarily mean you have an agenda.
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The formula for creative writing in high school or college is write what you know.
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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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Every now and then she looked around for tangible evidence of his having ever been there. Where were the butterflies? the blueberries? the whistling reed? She could find nothing, for he had left nothing but his stunning absence.
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Listen, baby, people do funny things. Specially us. The cards are stacked against us and just trying to stay in the game, stay alive and in the game, makes us do funny things. Things we can't help. Things that make us hurt one another. We don't even know why.
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If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.
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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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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.
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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.
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An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.
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If you can't count, they can cheat you. If you can't read, they can beat you.
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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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