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

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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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I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.
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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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It had been the longest time since she had had a rib-scraping laugh. She had forgotten how deep and down it could be. So different from the miscellaneous giggles and smiles she had learned to be content with these past few years.
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Occasionally, as children, we might figure out how to call somebody a name, and they would figure out how to call us. But it wasn't - it was so light. It was so fluffy. I didn't really have a strong awareness of segregation and the separation of races until I left Lorain, Ohio.
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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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There is no civilization that did not begin with art, Whether it was drawing a line in the sand, painting a cave or dancing.
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they ran in the sunlight, creating their own breeze which pressed their dresses into their damp skin. Reaching a kind of square of four locked trees which promised cooling they flung themselves into the shade to taste their lip sweat and contemplate the wildness that had come upon them so suddenly
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A man ain't nothing but a man. But a son? Well, now, that's somebody.
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Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers - not the defined.
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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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...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 feel like today we always glorify the young, just-plucked-from-college writer. But it's much harder to start writing later, in middle age, struggling on a book around a full-time job and family.
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Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.
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In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it's nothing else but color.
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We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.
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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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It would be ten years before they saw each other again, and their meeting would be thick with birds.
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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. No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens — that letting go — you let go because you can.
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You been gone too long, Sula. Not too long, but maybe too far.
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