"The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers."
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Quote collection
Toni Morrison quotes (page 10 of 22)
430 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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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"...she needed to confirm its presence. Like the keeper of the lighthouse and the prisoner, she regarded it as a mooring, a checkpoint, some stable visual object that assured her that the world was still there; that this was like and not a dream. That she was alive somewhere, inside, which she acknowledged to be true only because a thing she knew intimately was out there, outside of herself."
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"My daddy's face is a study. Winter moves into it and presides there. His eyes become a cliff of snow threatening to avalanche, his eyebrows bend like black limbs of leafless trees. His skin takes on the pale cheerless yellow of winter sun; for a jaw he has the edges of a snowbound field dotted with stubble; his high forehead is the frozen sweep of the Erie."
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"A lot of black people believe that Jews in this country have become white. They behave like white people rather than Jewish people."
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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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"Wait, wait, wait, wait. Don't try to write through it, to force it. Many do, but that won't work. Just wait, it will come."
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"You need intelligence, and you need to look. You need a gaze, a wide gaze, penetrating and roving - thats what's useful for art."
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"If you can't count, they can cheat you. If you can't read, they can beat you."
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"You rely on a sentence to say more than the denotation and the connotation; you revel in the smoke that the words send up."
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"The difference between that which is humane and that which is patriotic is a vital difference."
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"Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth."
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"Anything I have ever learned of any consequence, I have learned from Black people. I have never been bored by any Black person, ever."
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"I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither.... So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger."
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"Long before I was a success, my parents made me feel like I could be one."
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"Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it."
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"Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be."
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"Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do."
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"I remember a very important lesson that my father gave me when I was twelve or thirteen. He said, "You know, today I welded a perfect seam and I signed my name to it." And I said, "But, Daddy, no one's going to see it!" And he said, "Yeah, but I know it's there." So when I was working in kitchens, I did good work."
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"Our ancestors are an ever widening circle of hope."
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