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

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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.
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At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.
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I dream a dream that dreams back at me.
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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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I know it's trash: just another story made up to scare wicked females and correct unruly children. But it's all I have. I know I need something else. Something better. Like a story that shows how brazen women can take a good man down. I can hum to that.
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We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.
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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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Black women are the touchstone by which all that is human can be measured.
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Anything dead coming back to life hurts.
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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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The formula for creative writing in high school or college is write what you know.
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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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For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone the flowers appear on the earth the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.
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Sometimes the names were humiliating, deliberately so. Somebody would pick out your flaw. If you were little, they would call you Shorty. And if you were angry, they would call you the Devil.
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Word-work is sublime... because it is generative it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference-the way in which we are like no other life. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
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Not knowing it was hard knowing it was harder
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Misery colored by the greens and blues in my mother's voice took away all the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet.
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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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When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.
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There is no civilization that did not begin with art, Whether it was drawing a line in the sand, painting a cave or dancing.
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