"All important things are hard."
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Quote collection
Toni Morrison quotes (page 4 of 22)
430 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression."
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"The race thing is sort of a misnomer. It's just the human race, right? That's it. The rest of it, and racism, is socially constructed. Nobody is born racist, no one. What happens is other things that are usually based on power, money, feeling good about yourself, or bad about yourself, those things play into hating other people for whatever reason."
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"You are your own stories and therefore free to imagine and experience what it means to be human... And although you don't have complete control over the narrative - no author does, I can tell you - you could nevertheless create it."
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"It was becoming a habit-this concentration on things behind him. Almost as though there were no future to be had. *Milkman*"
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"Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It's not having no responsibilitie s; it's choosing the ones you want."
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"Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this mission. No committee decides who may enter, no crisis of body or spirit must accompany the entrant. No tuition is charged, no oath sworn, no visa demanded. Of the monuments humans build for themselves, very few say - touch me, use me, my hush is not indifference, my space is not barrier. If I inspire awe, it is because I am in awe of you and the possibilities that dwell in you."
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"Each member of the family in his own cell of consciousness, each making his own patchwork quilt of reality - collecting fragments of experience here, pieces of information there. From the tiny impressions gleaned from one another, they created a sense of belonging and tried to make do with the way they found each other."
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"From my point of view, your life is already a miracle of chance waiting for you to shape its destiny."
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"What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them."
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"You free. Nothing and nobody is obliged to save you but you."
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"A dream is just a nightmare with lipstick."
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"No one ever talks about the moment you found that you were white. Or the moment you found out you were black. That's a profound revelation. The minute you find that out, something happens. You have to renegotiate everything."
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"I don't know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands."
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"We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom."
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"Passion is never enough; neither is skill."
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"The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order."
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"There is really nothing more to say - except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how."
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"Definitions belong to the definer, not the defined."
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"An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines."
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