Quote

My father saw two black men lynched on his street in Cartersville, as a child. And I think seeing two black businessmen - not vagrants - hanging from trees as a child was traumatic for him.

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
Saws
Lynched
Children
Streets
Vagrants
Men
Tree
Businessmen
Think
Seeing
Traumatic
Thinking
Child
Businessman
Hanging
Black
Trees
Father
Street
Two

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I tell my students there is such a thing as 'writer's block,' and they should respect it. You shouldn't write through it. It's blocked because it ought to be blocked, because you haven't got it right now.
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Which was what love was: unmotivated respect.
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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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A son ain't what a woman say. A son is what a man do.
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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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If happiness is anticipation with certainty, we were happy.
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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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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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If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.
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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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Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you'd have a little love left over for the next one.
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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.
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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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The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers.
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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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A friend gathers all the pieces and gives them back in the right order.
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Everything depends on knowing how much,” she said, and “Good is knowing when to stop.
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When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.
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Now he knew why he loved her so. Without ever leaving the ground, she could fly. 'There must be another one like you,' he whispered to her. 'There's got to be at least one more woman like you.
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Sifting daylight dissolves the memory, turns it into dust motes floating in light.
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