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I thought the whole world was like Lorain.
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
Thought
Whole
Like
World
More quotes by Toni Morrison
I guess I'm depressed. I don't know. I can't explain it. Part of it is the irritability of being 84, and part of it is being not as physically strong as I once was. And part of it is my misunderstanding, I think, of what's going on in the world.
Toni Morrison
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.
Toni Morrison
Most of the really good literature I've read in my life was political, meaning it was important - about something going on in the history of the world - or contemporary.
Toni Morrison
I began to realize that this idea of the lighter the better and the darker the worse was really - had an impact on sororities, on friendships, on all sorts of things, and it was stunning to me.
Toni Morrison
The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.
Toni Morrison
What I'm doing ain't about hating White people. It's about loving us.
Toni Morrison
Lonely, ain't it? Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else's. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain't that something? A secondhand lonely.
Toni Morrison
Black women have always been friends. I mean, if you didn't have each other you had nothing.
Toni Morrison
Language can never 'pin down' slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity, is in its reach toward the ineffable.
Toni Morrison
In Ohio seasons are theatrical. Each one enters like a prima donna, convinced its performance is the reason the world has people in it.
Toni Morrison
Can't nothing heal without pain, you know.
Toni Morrison
Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.
Toni Morrison
If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up.
Toni Morrison
Evil is so seductive. It needs to grind you up and make you its slave.
Toni Morrison
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.
Toni Morrison
Anything dead coming back to life hurts.
Toni Morrison
Each member of the family in his own cell of consciousness, each making his own patchwork quilt of reality - collecting fragments of experience here, pieces of information there. From the tiny impressions gleaned from one another, they created a sense of belonging and tried to make do with the way they found each other.
Toni Morrison
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.
Toni Morrison
...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.
Toni Morrison
This word LOVE - discredited, clicheed - can be restored and love, the instinct, the impulse to care for somebody in the hope that somebody will care for you - plus our language, the language, a language - is about all we have. With everything else going on, this is what makes us, what keeps us human.
Toni Morrison
