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The past is interesting to me because it's been dumbed down or flattened out, or academically nitpicked so you can't get any life out of it, you just get data.
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
Past
Life
Flattened
Academically
Data
Interesting
More quotes by Toni Morrison
You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone.
Toni Morrison
Did you ever see the way the clouds love a mountain? They circle all around it sometimes you can't even see the mountain for the clouds. But you know what? ... The clouds never cover the head. His head pokes through, because the clouds let him they don't wrap him up. They let him keep his head high, free.
Toni Morrison
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.
Toni Morrison
Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another - physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.
Toni Morrison
What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.
Toni Morrison
Her mind traveled crooked streets and aimless goat paths, arriving sometimes at profundity, other times at the revelations of a three-year-old. Throughout this fresh, if common, pursuit of knowledge, one conviction crowned her efforts: ...she knew there was nothing to fear.
Toni Morrison
Oppressive language does more than represent violence it is violence does more than represent the limits of knowledge it limits knowledge.
Toni Morrison
If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.
Toni Morrison
It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love ... You can't own a human being.
Toni Morrison
I guess I'm depressed. I don't know. I can't explain it. Part of it is the irritability of being 84, and part of it is being not as physically strong as I once was. And part of it is my misunderstanding, I think, of what's going on in the world.
Toni Morrison
Writing is really a way of thinking--not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.
Toni Morrison
When a child walks in the room, your child or anybody else’s child, do your eyes light up? That’s what they’re looking for.
Toni Morrison
For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone the flowers appear on the earth the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.
Toni Morrison
You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question.
Toni Morrison
What's interesting about writing is the invention, the creative thing. Writing about myself is a yawn.
Toni Morrison
I thought the whole world was like Lorain.
Toni Morrison
In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.
Toni Morrison
Everything depends on knowing how much,” she said, and “Good is knowing when to stop.
Toni Morrison
You looked at me then like you knew me, and I thought it really was Eden, and I couldn't take your eyes in because I was loving the hoof marks on your cheeks.
Toni Morrison
If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.
Toni Morrison
