Quote

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.

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
Would
Angry
Devil
Shorty
Somebody
Flaw
Names
Humiliating
Call
Deliberately
Littles
Flaws
Little
Pick
Sometimes
Picks

More quotes by Toni Morrison

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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 thought the whole world was like Lorain.
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I'm just trying to look at something without blinking, to see what it is like, or it could have been like, and how that had something to do with the way we live now. Novels are always inquiries for me.
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In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.
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Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.
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If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.
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The isolation, the separateness, is always a part of any utopia.
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A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves - a special kind of double.
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But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.
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Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.
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Political doesn't necessarily mean you have an agenda.
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Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs—all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured
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Evil is so seductive. It needs to grind you up and make you its slave.
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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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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 don't think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It's perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man.
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[Obama is ] creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom . . . [He is] the man for this time.
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My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren't my children.
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My metaphor is that evil always has a top hat and a cape, and goodness is over there in the corner. For me it's just too easy, if you hate your country or your wife, so you kill them. You can't think through that, you can't feel through that, you can't do the work. And now we have guns. Solution? I don't think so.
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She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it's there, because it can't hurt, and because what difference does it make?
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