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

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She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.
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I have a lot of respect for readers because I'm a reader. That's how I got into writing.
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I am in the position of judging people by the best they've ever done rather than the worst.
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Sifting daylight dissolves the memory, turns it into dust motes floating in light.
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It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love ... You can't own a human being.
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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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You been gone too long, Sula. Not too long, but maybe too far.
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I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.
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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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If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down.
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Unpersecuted, unjailed, unharrassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world's resources.
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For a long time I was convinced that the conflict between Jewish people and black people in this country was a media event.
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What do you say? There really are no words for that. There really aren't. Somebody tries to say, 'I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.' People say that to me. There's no language for it. Sorry doesn't do it. I think you should just hug people and mop their floor or something.
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Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers.
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Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.
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Sunk in the grass of an empty lot on a spring Saturday, I split the stems of milkweed and thought about ants and peach pits and death and where the world went when I closed my eyes.
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I dream a dream that dreams back at me.
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Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live
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Beauty was not simply something to behold it was something one could do.
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Not knowing it was hard knowing it was harder
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