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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
Look
Looks
Men
Think
Thinking
Violent
Wrong
Father
Didn

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Perhaps that's what all human relationships boiled down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?
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Much handled things are always soft(27).
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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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I feel like today we always glorify the young, just-plucked-from-college writer. But it's much harder to start writing later, in middle age, struggling on a book around a full-time job and family.
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The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one.
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Love it, love it and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.
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Gimme hate, Lord,” he whimpered. “I’ll take hate any day. But don’t give me love. I can’t take no more love, Lord. I can’t carry it...It’s too heavy. Jesus, you know, you know all about it. Ain’t it heavy? Jesus? Ain’t love heavy?
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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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Not knowing it was hard knowing it was harder
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Can't nothing heal without pain, you know.
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Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth.
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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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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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A dead hydrangea is as intricate and lovely as one in bloom. Bleak sky is as seductive as sunshine, miniature orange trees without blossom or fruit are not defective they are that.
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I can't explain inspiration. A writer is either compelled to write or not. And if I waited for inspiration I wouldn't really be a writer.
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My metaphor is that evil always has a top hat and a cape, and goodness is over there in the corner. For me it's just too easy, if you hate your country or your wife, so you kill them. You can't think through that, you can't feel through that, you can't do the work. And now we have guns. Solution? I don't think so.
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I couldn't bear to have people mispronounce my name. But the person I was was this person who was called Chloe.
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The habit of getting up early, which I had formed when the children were young, now became my choice. I am not very bright or very witty or very inventive after the sun goes down.
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Writing is really a way of thinking--not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.
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The theme you choose may change or simply elude you, but being your own story means you can always choose the tone. It also means that you can invent the language to say who are you and what you mean.
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