"Unless carefree, mother love was a killer."
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Quote collection
Toni Morrison quotes (page 12 of 22)
430 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it's not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place--the picture of it--stays, and not just in my remory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don't think if, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened."
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"I merged those two words, black and feminist, because I was surrounded by black women who were very tough and and who always assumed they had to work and rear children and manage homes."
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"The idea of a wanton woman is something I have inserted into almost all of my books. An outlaw figure who is disallowed in the community because of her imagination or activity or status - that kind of anarchic figure has always fascinated me. And the benefits they bring with them, in spite of the fact that they are either dismissed or upbraided - something about their presence is constructive in the long run."
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"Political doesn't necessarily mean you have an agenda."
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"There is a certain kind of peace that is not merely the absence of war. It is larger than that. The peace I am thinking of is not at the mercy of history's rule, nor is it a passive surrender to the status quo. The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one -- an activity that occurs most naturally, most often in the reading/writing world we live in. Accessible as it is, this particular kind of peace warrants vigilance."
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"For a long time I was convinced that the conflict between Jewish people and black people in this country was a media event."
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"He wants to put his story next to hers."
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"Like Guitar in Son of Solomon, and Son in Tar Baby, he believed that harmony could never exist between the races."
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"My first-born. All I can remember of her is how she loved the burned bottom of bread. Can you beat that? Eight children and that's all I remember."
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"There is nothing of any consequence in education, in the economy, in city planning, in social policy that does not concern black people."
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"We never shape the world . . . the world shapes us."
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"Anger ... it's a paralyzing emotion ... you can't get anything done. People sort of think it's an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling — I don't think it's any of that — it's helpless ... it's absence of control — and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers ... and anger doesn't provide any of that — I have no use for it whatsoever." [Interview with CBS radio host Don Swaim, September 15, 1987.]"
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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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"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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"Literature, it seems to me, is wisdom."
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"Two parents can't raise a child any more than one. You need a whole community - everybody - to raise a child. And the little nuclear family is a paradigm that just doesn't work. It doesn't work for white people or for black people. Why are we hanging onto it, I don't know. It isolates people into little units - people need a larger unit."
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"There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind--wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one's own feet going seem to come from a far-off place."
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"If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic."
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"My home is such a powerfully imaginative place that the space is almost irrelevant. I think the house I live at on the Hudson is where I belong because it's the only place where I am that I never think about when I'm leaving."
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