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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.
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
Devil
Shorty
Somebody
Flaw
Names
Humiliating
Call
Deliberately
Littles
Flaws
Little
Pick
Sometimes
Picks
Would
Angry
More quotes by Toni Morrison
In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.
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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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The formula for creative writing in high school or college is write what you know.
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The screams of a hurt woman were indistinguishable from everyday traffic.
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A dream is just a nightmare with lipstick.
Toni Morrison
Don’t beg anybody for anything, especially love.
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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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I know there's some poetry that sort of sounds like daisies, but most of the good poetry is also [political], you can feel the heartbeat it's about some situation that concerns human beings under duress. It's suggesting a solution, or just acknowledging that [the situation] exists. Art does that.
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Language can never 'pin down' slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity, is in its reach toward the ineffable.
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I want to feel what I feel. What's mine. Even if it's not happiness, whatever that means. Because you're all you've got.
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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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Racism will disappear when it's no longer profitable, and no longer psychologically useful. And when that happens, it'll be gone. But at the moment, people make a lot of money off of it, pro and con.
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Nobody loved her and she wouldn’t have liked it if they had, she considered love a serious disability.
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Your life is already artful-waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.
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If happiness is anticipation with certainty, we were happy.
Toni Morrison
I am in the position of judging people by the best they've ever done rather than the worst.
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Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It's not having no responsibilitie s it's choosing the ones you want.
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The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.
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If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.
Toni Morrison
Make up a story... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.
Toni Morrison
