You don’t have to love me but you damn well have to respect me.
TONI MORRISONA sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves – a special kind of double.
More Toni Morrison Quotes
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Racism will disappear when it’s no longer profitable, and no longer psychologically useful. And when that happens, it’ll be gone. But at the moment, people make a lot of money off of it, pro and con.
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It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.
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A friend gathers all the pieces and gives them back in the right order.
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You are your own stories.
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Anything dead coming back to life hurts.
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There’s a difference between writing for a living and writing for life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises. If you write for life, you’ll work hard; you’ll do what’s honest, not what pays.
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Liberation means you don’t have to be silenced.
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You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone.
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If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.
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If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.
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In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.
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A writer’s life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.
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Don’t beg anybody for anything, especially love.
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Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.
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Let your face speak what’s in your heart.
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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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It was a fine cry – loud and long – but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.
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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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But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.
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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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All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.
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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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If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.
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I get angry about things, then go on and work.
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When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.
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All important things are hard.
TONI MORRISON