It was a fine cry – loud and long – but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.
TONI MORRISONWriting is really a way of thinking–not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.
More Toni Morrison Quotes
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A dream is just a nightmare with lipstick.
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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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Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It’s not having no responsibilitie s; it’s choosing the ones you want.
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Your life is already artful-waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.
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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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All art is knowing when to stop.
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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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You don’t have to love me but you damn well have to respect me.
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The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.
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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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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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Liberation means you don’t have to be silenced.
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Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face; you are me.
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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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I want to discourage you from choosing anything or making any decision simply because it is safe. Things of value seldom are.
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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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Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.
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I type in one place, but I write all over the house.
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I get angry about things, then go on and work.
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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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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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Anything dead coming back to life hurts.
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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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You are your own stories.
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But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.
TONI MORRISON