"Girl, I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me...my lonely is mine."
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Quote collection
Toni Morrison quotes (page 16 of 22)
430 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Listening to the doves in Alfred, Georgia, and having neither the right nor the permission to enjoy it because in that place mist, doves, sunlight, copper dirt, moon-everything belonged to the men who had the guns. . . . So you protected yourself and loved small. . . . A woman, a child, a brother-a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. . . . To get to a place where you could love anything you chose-not to need permission for desire-well now, that was freedom"
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"Most of the really good literature I've read in my life was political, meaning it was important - about something going on in the history of the world - or contemporary."
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"I lived in a little working-class town that had no black neighborhoods at all - one high school. We all played together. Everybody was either somebody from the South or an immigrant from East Europe or from Mexico. And there was one church, and there were four elementary schools. And we were all, pretty much until the end of the war, very, very poor."
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"More than fear of loving bears or birds bigger than cows, I fear pathless nights. How, I wonder, can I find you in the dark?"
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"Maybe [I care about language] because I'm an editor, maybe because I'm picky, but it's all we got, don't shrink it. Don't dumb it out, make it little."
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"Everything depends on knowing how much,” she said, and “Good is knowing when to stop."
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"...when the little boy discovered, at four, the same thing Mr. Smith had learned earlier -- that only birds and planes could fly -- he lost all interest in himself."
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"But her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day."
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"The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over."
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"...the change was adjustment without improvement."
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"Usually I try to be there by six. Everything has been taken off the walls so that there's nothing to arrest my sight. On the bed I have Roget's Thesaurus, a dictionary, a Bible, and a deck of playing cards."
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"When a man angers you, he conquers you."
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"Never did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed him ... His subconscious knew what his min did not guess-that hating them would have consumed him, burned him up like a piece of soft coal, leaving only flakes of ash and a question mark of smoke."
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"Being good to somebody is just like being mean to somebody. Risky. You don't get nothing for it."
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"Lonely, ain't it? Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else's. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain't that something? A secondhand lonely."
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"I sometimes lose interest in the characters and get much more interested in the trees and animals."
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"Like friendship, hatred needed more than physical intimacy; it wanted creativity and hard work to sustain itself"
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"In my mother's church, everybody read the Bible and it was mostly about music. My mother had the most beautiful voice I have ever heard in my life. She could sing anything - classical, jazz, blues, opera. And people came from long distances to that little church she went to - African Methodist Episcopal, the AME church she belonged to - just hear her."
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"I know that my books are worthy, which is separate from me."
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