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

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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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Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers.
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Political doesn't necessarily mean you have an agenda.
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A son ain't what a woman say. A son is what a man do.
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I tell my students one of the most important things they need to know is when they are at their best, creatively. They need to ask themselves, What does the ideal room look like? Is there music? Is there silence? Is there chaos outside or is there serenity outside? What do I need in order to release my imagination?
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...the City is what they want it to be: thriftless, warm, scary and full of amiable strangers. No wonder they forget pebbly creeks and when they do not forget the sky completely think of it as a tiny piece of information about the time of day or night.
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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.
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What I'm doing ain't about hating White people. It's about loving us.
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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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Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?
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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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I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me.
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A friend gathers all the pieces and gives them back in the right order.
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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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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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An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.
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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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The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.
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I sometimes lose interest in the characters and get much more interested in the trees and animals.
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[Obama is ] creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom . . . [He is] the man for this time.
Toni Morrison