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

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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.
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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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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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I think women dwell quite a bit on the duress under which they work, on how hard it is just to do it at all. We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped creative work in there between the domestic chores and obligations. I'm not sure we deserve such big A-pluses for all that.
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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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My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren't my children.
Toni Morrison
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The seeds of destruction lie in the definition of chosen-ness and can easily blossom into bigotry. It's not inevitable but it needs constant care to avoid.
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Anything dead coming back to life hurts.
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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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He leans over and takes her hand. With the other he touches her face. ‘You your best thing, Sethe. You are.’ His holding fingers are holding hers. ‘Me? Me?
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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.
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I thought the whole world was like Lorain.
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Did you ever see the way the clouds love a mountain? They circle all around it sometimes you can't even see the mountain for the clouds. But you know what? ... The clouds never cover the head. His head pokes through, because the clouds let him they don't wrap him up. They let him keep his head high, free.
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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.
Toni Morrison
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If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down.
Toni Morrison
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The habit of getting up early, which I had formed when the children were young, now became my choice. I am not very bright or very witty or very inventive after the sun goes down.
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Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.
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We're all surrounded by what I call faux language, fake language of commerce, of news media.
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The screams of a hurt woman were indistinguishable from everyday traffic.
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If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.
Toni Morrison