"It was a fine cry - loud and long - but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow."
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Quote collection
Toni Morrison quotes (page 3 of 22)
430 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And white people have a very, very serious problem."
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"There is an incredible amount of magic and feistiness in black men that nobody has been able to wipe out. But everybody has tried."
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"Make a difference about something other than yourselves."
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"When you first start writing-and I think it's true for a lot of beginning writers-you're scared to death that if you don't get that sentence right that minute it's never going to show up again. And it isn't. But it doesn't matter-another one will, and it'll probably be better. And I don't mind writing badly for a couple of days because I know I can fix it-and fix it again and again and again, and it will be better."
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"Birth, life, and death― each took place on the hidden side of a leaf."
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"Schools must stop being holding pens to keep energetic young people off the job market and off the streets. We stretch puberty out a long, long time."
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"When a child walks in the room, your child or anybody else’s child, do your eyes light up? That’s what they’re looking for."
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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. No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens — that letting go — you let go because you can."
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"Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it."
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"There's a difference between writing for a living and writing for life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises.... If you write for life, you'll work hard; you'll do what's honest, not what pays"
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"The writing is - I'm free of pain. It's the place where I live; it's where I have control; it's where nobody tells me what to do; it's where my imagination is fecund and I am really at my best. Nothing matters more in the world or in my body or anywhere when I'm writing."
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"A friend gathers all the pieces and gives them back in the right order."
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"I tell my students there is such a thing as 'writer's block,' and they should respect it. You shouldn't write through it. It's blocked because it ought to be blocked, because you haven't got it right now."
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"Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city."
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"True the Black woman did the housework, the drudgery; true, she reared the children, often alone, but she did all of that while occupying a place on the job market, a place her mate could not get or which his pride would not let him accept.And she had nothing to fall back on: not maleness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality she may very well have invented herself."
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"Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not, permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas."
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"Sunk in the grass of an empty lot on a spring Saturday, I split the stems of milkweed and thought about ants and peach pits and death and where the world went when I closed my eyes."
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"As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think."
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"In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate."
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