Quote

Occasionally, as children, we might figure out how to call somebody a name, and they would figure out how to call us. But it wasn't - it was so light. It was so fluffy. I didn't really have a strong awareness of segregation and the separation of races until I left Lorain, Ohio.

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
Would
Race
Figure
Strong
Figures
Left
Awareness
Fluffy
Didn
Wasn
Segregation
Light
Name
Ohio
Might
Somebody
Races
Children
Names
Occasionally
Really
Call
Separation

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In Ohio seasons are theatrical. Each one enters like a prima donna, convinced its performance is the reason the world has people in it.
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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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The screams of a hurt woman were indistinguishable from everyday traffic.
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What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.
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The concept of physical beauty as a virtue is one of the dumbest, most pernicious and destructive ideas of the Western world, and we should have nothing to do with it.
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Evil is just sort of ultimately boring. The good thing is just complicated. It's more provocative to me and more stimulating to me.
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I sang O Holy Night in a school choir. My mother came and listened to me and complimented me. So that was the high point. I cannot sing a note.
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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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Which was what love was: unmotivated respect.
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I'm not entangled in shaping my work according to other people's views of how I should have done it.
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Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.
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Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this mission.
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The function of freedom is to free someone else.
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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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Intimacy is extremely important to me and I want it to be extremely important to the readers.
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Anything I have ever learned of any consequence, I have learned from Black people. I have never been bored by any Black person, ever.
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Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.
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The race thing is sort of a misnomer. It's just the human race, right? That's it. The rest of it, and racism, is socially constructed. Nobody is born racist, no one. What happens is other things that are usually based on power, money, feeling good about yourself, or bad about yourself, those things play into hating other people for whatever reason.
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How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve 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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