"I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer - its dust and lowering skies."
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Quote collection
Toni Morrison quotes (page 1 of 22)
430 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down."
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"The function of freedom is to free someone else."
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"Don’t beg anybody for anything, especially love."
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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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"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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"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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"It's important, therefore, to know who the real enemy is, and to know the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn't shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Someone says you have no art so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing."
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"I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge - even wisdom. Like art."
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"In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent."
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"I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game."
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"All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was."
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"Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich inherit it. I don't mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network."
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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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"She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind."
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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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"Your life is already artful-waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art."
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"The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one."
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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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"Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another."
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