"The past is interesting to me because it's been dumbed down or flattened out, or academically nitpicked so you can't get any life out of it, you just get data."
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Quote collection
Toni Morrison quotes (page 7 of 22)
430 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I always start out with an idea, even a boring idea, that becomes a question I don't have answers to."
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"American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen."
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"Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. the lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glance of the lover’s inward eyes."
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"...black women write differently from white women. This is the most marked difference of all those combinations of black and white, male and female. It's not so much that women write differently from men, but that black women write differently from white women. Black men don't write very differently from white men."
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"I laughed but before I could agree with the hairdressers that she was crazy, she said, 'What's the world for if you can't make it up the way you want it?' " 'The way I want it?' " 'Yeah. The way you want it. Don't you want it to be something more than what it is?' " 'What'st eh point? I can't change it.' " 'That's the point. If you don't, it will change you and it'll be your fault cause you let it. I let it. And messed up my life.' " 'Mess it up how?' " 'Forgot it.' " 'Forgot?' " 'Forgot it was mine. My life. I just ran up and down the streets wishing I was somebody else."
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"Women's rights is not only an abstraction, a cause; it is also a personal affair. It is not only about us; it is also about me and you. Just the two of us."
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"The isolation, the separateness, is always a part of any utopia."
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"Pain. I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweettooth for it. Bolts of lightning, little rivulets of thunder. And I the eye of the storm."
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"What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?"
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"Something that is loved is never lost."
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"For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction."
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"When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same."
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"Somebody has to take responsibility for being a leader."
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"So this is what insanity is. Not goofy behavior, but watching a sudden change in the world you used to know."
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"Anything dead coming back to life hurts."
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"There, in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning. For loneliness assumed the absence of other people, and the solitude she found in that desperate terrain had never admitted the possibility of other people. She wept then. Tears for the deaths of the littlest things: the castaway shoes of children; broken stems of marsh grass battered and drowned by the sea; prom photographs of dead women she never knew; wedding rings in pawnshop windows; the tiny bodies of Cornish hens in a nest of rice."
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"The body is ready to have babies. Nature wants it done then, when the body can handle it, not after 40, when the income can handle it."
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"I am in the position of judging people by the best they've ever done rather than the worst."
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"Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face; you are me."
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