Literature, it seems to me, is wisdom.
TONI MORRISONI wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.
More Toni Morrison Quotes
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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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Anything dead coming back to life hurts.
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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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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.
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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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It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.
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The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.
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I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it.
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All art is knowing when to stop.
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You are your own stories.
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What a woman. What a life.
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In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.
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We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.
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If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.
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A friend gathers all the pieces and gives them back in the right order.
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You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone.
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Misery don’t call ahead. That’s why you have to stay awake – otherwise it just walks on in your door.
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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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The function of freedom is to free someone else.
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The enemy is not men. The enemy is the concept of patriarchy, the concept of patriarchy as the way to run the world or do things.
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Liberation means you don’t have to be silenced.
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My theory is that the world is a difficult place to live in and distraction is the name of the game.
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I’ve spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books.
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From my point of view, your life is already a miracle of chance waiting for you to shape its destiny.
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Something that is loved is never lost.
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You don’t have to love me but you damn well have to respect me.
TONI MORRISON