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Maybe [I care about language] because I'm an editor, maybe because I'm picky, but it's all we got, don't shrink it. Don't dumb it out, make it little.

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
Make
Editor
Editors
Dumb
Maybe
Language
Care
Picky
Littles
Shrink
Little
Shrinks

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Not knowing it was hard knowing it was harder
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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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What's the world for you if you can't make it up the way you want it?
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I know what every colored woman in this country is doing... Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I’m going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.
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I like marriage. The idea.
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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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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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I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.
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Black women are the touchstone by which all that is human can be measured.
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There is an incredible amount of magic and feistiness in black men that nobody has been able to wipe out. But everybody has tried.
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I began to realize that this idea of the lighter the better and the darker the worse was really - had an impact on sororities, on friendships, on all sorts of things, and it was stunning to me.
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Usually I try to be there by six. Everything has been taken off the walls so that there's nothing to arrest my sight. On the bed I have Roget's Thesaurus, a dictionary, a Bible, and a deck of playing cards.
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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.
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Whatever happens, whether you get rich or stay poor, ruin your health or live to old age, you always end up back where you started: hungry for the one thing everybody loses - young loving.
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The unflattering reviews are painful for short periods of time the badly written ones are deeply, deeply insulting. That reviewer took no time to really read the book.
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Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.
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You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone.
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the hopelessness that comes from knowing too little and feeling too much (so brittle, so dry he is in danger of the reverse: feeling nothing and knowing everything)
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A man ain't nothing but a man. But a son? Well, now, that's somebody.
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Jealousy we understood and thought natural... But envy was a strange, new feeling for us. And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us.
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