Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.
TONI MORRISONThere is really nothing more to say-except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.
More Toni Morrison Quotes
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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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Let your face speak what’s in your heart.
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All art is knowing when to stop.
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I type in one place, but I write all over the house.
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Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.
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Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face; you are me.
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Your life is already artful-waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.
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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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Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.
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Make a difference about something other than yourselves.
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You are your own stories.
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What a woman. What a life.
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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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Something that is loved is never lost.
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I get angry about things, then go on and work.
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We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.
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And I am all the things I have ever loved: scuppernong wine, cool baptisms in silent water, dream books and number playing.
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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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What’s the world for you if you can’t make it up the way you want it?
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The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.
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You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.
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To get to a place where you could love anything you chose – not to need permission for desire – well now that was freedom.
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You are your best thing.
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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 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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Writing is really a way of thinking–not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.
TONI MORRISON