"No gasp at a miracle that is truly miraculous because the magic lies in the fact that you knew it was there for you all along."
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Quote collection
Toni Morrison quotes (page 11 of 22)
430 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Sifting daylight dissolves the memory, turns it into dust motes floating in light."
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"Can't nothing heal without pain, you know."
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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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"I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can't teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort."
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"If happiness is anticipation with certainty, we were happy."
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"You marvel at the economy and this choice of words. How many ways can you describe the sky and the moon? After Sylvia Plath, what can you say?"
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"I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life."
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"I guess I'm depressed. I don't know. I can't explain it. Part of it is the irritability of being 84, and part of it is being not as physically strong as I once was. And part of it is my misunderstanding, I think, of what's going on in the world."
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"You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question."
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"When you gone to get married? You need to have some babies. It’ll settle you.' 'I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself."
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"And wouldn't you know he'd be a singing man."
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"Isolation, you know, carries the seeds of its own destruction because as times change, other things seep in."
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"I have the wonderful pleasure of finishing the book and closing it. And I don't read them later."
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"It's been mentioned or suggested that Paradise will not be well studied, because it's about this unimportant intellectual topic, which is religion."
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"If we had no language we'd have nothing."
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"They had stared at her with great uncomprehending eyes. Eyes that questioned nothing and asked everything. Unblinking and unabashed, they stared up at her. The end of the world lay in their eyes, and the beginning, and all the waste in bewteen."
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"Every now and then she looked around for tangible evidence of his having ever been there. Where were the butterflies? the blueberries? the whistling reed? She could find nothing, for he had left nothing but his stunning absence."
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"No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you."
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"It was not death or dying that frightened him, but the unexpectedness of both. In sorting it all out, he hit on the notion that if one day a year were devoted to it, everybody could get it out of the way and the rest of the year would be safe and free. In this manner he instituted National Suicide Day."
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