"Misery don't call ahead. That's why you have to stay awake - otherwise it just walks on in your door."
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Quote collection
Toni Morrison quotes (page 2 of 22)
430 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I don't think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It's perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man."
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"Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined."
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"Please don't settle for happiness. It's not good enough. Of course you deserve it, but if that's all you have in mind - happiness - I want to suggest to you that personal success devoid of meaningfulness, free of a steady commitment to social justice - that's more than a barren life. It's a trivial one."
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"Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form."
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"At some point in life, the world's beauty becomes enough."
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"Books ARE a form of political action. Books are knowledge. Books are reflection. Books change your mind."
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"Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all."
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"I want to discourage you from choosing anything or making any decision simply because it is safe. Things of value seldom are"
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"They seemed to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds― cooled ―and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path."
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"How come it can’t fly no better than a chicken?’ Milkman asked. Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can’t nobody fly with all that [stuff]. Wanna fly, you got to give up the [stuff] that weighs you down.’ The peacock jumped onto the hood of the Buick and once more spread its tail, sending the flashy Buick into oblivion."
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"Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you'd have a little love left over for the next one."
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"I dream a dream that dreams back at me."
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"All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in."
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"At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough."
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"I am a writer and my faith in the world of art is intense, but not irrational, nor naïve - because art takes us and makes us take a journey beyond price, beyond cost, into bearing witness to the world as it is and as it should be. Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances."
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"Love is never any better than the lover."
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"I really want some meaning. It used to be easy to toss it off. Now it's harder and harder. You have to navigate just to find something that has nourishment. It's the absence of nourishment. What do you do in place of nourishment? It's usually junk. Either it's junk food or junk clothes or junk ideas."
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"You are your best thing"
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"Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are."
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