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Evil is so seductive. It needs to grind you up and make you its slave.

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
Slave
Evil
Needs
Make
Seductive
Grind

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The body is ready to have babies. Nature wants it done then, when the body can handle it, not after 40, when the income can handle it.
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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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Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.
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I can't explain inspiration. A writer is either compelled to write or not. And if I waited for inspiration I wouldn't really be a writer.
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Womanists is what black feminists used to call themselves. Very much so. They were not the same thing. And also the relationship with men. Historically, black women have always sheltered their men because they were out there, and they were the ones that were most likely to be killed.
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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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It was becoming a habit-this concentration on things behind him. Almost as though there were no future to be had. *Milkman*
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The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.
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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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Most of the really good literature I've read in my life was political, meaning it was important - about something going on in the history of the world - or contemporary.
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Each member of the family in his own cell of consciousness, each making his own patchwork quilt of reality - collecting fragments of experience here, pieces of information there. From the tiny impressions gleaned from one another, they created a sense of belonging and tried to make do with the way they found each other.
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Life that crawled, life that slunk and crept and never closed its eyes. Life that burrowed and scurried, and life so still it was indistinguishable from the ivy stems on which it lay. Birth, life, and death - each took place on the hidden side of a leaf.
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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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Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you'd have a little love left over for the next one.
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When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.
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The screams of a hurt woman were indistinguishable from everyday traffic.
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I don't want you to write about what you know, because you don't know anything. I don't want to hear about your boyfriend or your grandma... I'm getting a little tired of 'my life story as fiction'. Please don't tell me about your little life - is there nothing larger? More important?
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I tell my students there is such a thing as 'writer's block,' and they should respect it. You shouldn't write through it. It's blocked because it ought to be blocked, because you haven't got it right now.
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Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth.
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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.
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