Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.
TONI MORRISONYou need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone.
More Toni Morrison Quotes
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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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Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.
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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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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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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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In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.
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What a woman. What a life.
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Let your face speak what’s in your heart.
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You free. Nothing and nobody is obliged to save you but you.
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Anything dead coming back to life hurts.
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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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A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves – a special kind of double.
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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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I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it.
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We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.
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Black people’s music is in a class by itself and always has been.
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When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.
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I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.
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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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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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Navigating a white male world was not threatening. It wasn’t even interesting. I was more interesting than they were.
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Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.
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Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
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In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent. This is precisely the time when artists go to work.
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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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All important things are hard.
TONI MORRISON