A friend gathers all the pieces and gives them back in the right order.
TONI MORRISONI didn’t want to speak for black people. I wanted to speak to and to be among. It’s us.
More Toni Morrison Quotes
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As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.
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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 wrote my first novel because I wanted to read 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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Black women have always been friends. I mean, if you didn’t have each other you had nothing.
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We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
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Books are a form of political action. Books are knowledge. Books are reflection. Books change your mind.
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Sometimes what I write on the page frightens me, so I feel free when I write, but I don’t feel safe.
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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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We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.
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Lonely was much better than alone.
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All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.
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There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race – scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct, it has a social function, racism.
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If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And white people have a very, very serious problem.
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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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Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.
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Being able to laugh got me through.
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You don’t have to love me but you damn well have to respect me.
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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.
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The function of freedom is to free someone else.
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Writing is really a way of thinking–not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.
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Black people’s music is in a class by itself and always has been.
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Let your face speak what’s in your heart.
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Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
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The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one.
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He can’t value you more than you value yourself.
TONI MORRISON