Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.
TONI MORRISONYour life is already artful-waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.
More Toni Morrison Quotes
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A friend gathers all the pieces and gives them back in the right order.
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I didn’t want to speak for black people. I wanted to speak to and to be among. It’s us.
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Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.
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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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I dream a dream that dreams back at me.
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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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Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.
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All important things are hard.
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When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.
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If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.
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There is really nothing more to say-except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.
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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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Books are a form of political action. Books are knowledge. Books are reflection. Books change your mind.
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The function of freedom is to free someone else.
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A writer’s life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.
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You are your best thing.
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I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it.
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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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Literature, it seems to me, is wisdom.
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Let your face speak what’s in your heart.
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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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Black women have always been friends. I mean, if you didn’t have each other you had nothing.
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I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer – its dust and lowering skies.
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Passion is never enough; neither is skill.
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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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We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.
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