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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
Wrong
Father
Didn
Look
Looks
Men
Think
Thinking
Violent

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Pain. I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweettooth for it. Bolts of lightning, little rivulets of thunder. And I the eye of the storm.
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The past is interesting to me because it's been dumbed down or flattened out, or academically nitpicked so you can't get any life out of it, you just get data.
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One of my kids was born in 1968. There were going to be political difficulties, but they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to.
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Your life is already artful-waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.
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When a child walks in the room, your child or anybody else’s child, do your eyes light up? That’s what they’re looking for.
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There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.
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If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.
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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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Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.
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We're all surrounded by what I call faux language, fake language of commerce, of news media.
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...when the little boy discovered, at four, the same thing Mr. Smith had learned earlier -- that only birds and planes could fly -- he lost all interest in himself.
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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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Well, feel this, why don't you? Feel how it feels to have a bed to sleep in and somebody there not worrying you to death about what you got to do each day to deserve it. Feel how that feels. And if that don't get it, feel how it feels to be a colored woman roaming the roads with anything God made liable to jump on you. Feel that.
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Race is the least reliable information you can have about someone. It's real information, but it tells you next to nothing.
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Think of anybody - Dostoevsky or Jane Austen - [their work] was always something that now we would call political. So I don't see those separations too much, between what is artistic and what is political. Maybe in painting... no, I don't even believe that.
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Don’t beg anybody for anything, especially love.
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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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Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.
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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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And wouldn't you know he'd be a singing man.
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