"It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you."
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Toni Morrison quotes (page 8 of 22)
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"She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it's there, because it can't hurt, and because what difference does it make?"
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"I don't believe any real artists have ever been non-political. They may have been insensitive to this particular plight or insensitive to that, but they were political, because that's what an artist is-a politician."
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"Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers - not the defined."
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"My world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger."
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"I like marriage. The idea."
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"In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it's nothing else but color."
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"Her mind traveled crooked streets and aimless goat paths, arriving sometimes at profundity, other times at the revelations of a three-year-old. Throughout this fresh, if common, pursuit of knowledge, one conviction crowned her efforts: ...she knew there was nothing to fear."
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"I type in one place, but I write all over the house."
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"Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another - physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion."
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"But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer."
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"Love just seems to make life not just livable, but a gallant, gallant event."
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"Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?"
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"Jealousy we understood and thought natural... But envy was a strange, new feeling for us. And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us."
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"Nelson Mandela is, for me, the single statesman in the world. The single statesman, in that literal sense, who is not solving all his problems with guns. It's truly unbelievable."
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"Here I am not the one to throw out. No one steals my warmth and shoes because I am small. No one handles my backside. No one whinnies like sheep or goat because I drop in fear and weakness. No one screams at the sight of me. No one watches my body for how it is unseemly. With you my body is pleasure is safe is belonging. I can never not have you have me."
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"I think women dwell quite a bit on the duress under which they work, on how hard it is just to do it at all. We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped creative work in there between the domestic chores and obligations. I'm not sure we deserve such big A-pluses for all that."
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"As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer."
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"All she saw, down in the cellar well beneath the stoop, was a light yellow feather with a tip of green. And she had never named him. Had called him "my parrot" all these years. "My parrot." "Love you. "Love you." Did the dogs get him? Or did he get the message - that she said, "My parrot" and he said, "Love you," and she had never said it back or even taken the trouble to name him - and manage somehow to fly away on wings that had not soared for six years."
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"Home is memory, home is your history, home is where you work. Some people want to abandon it and become truly local. But the questions are all there."
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