Best Quotes by Toni Morrison (Top 10)
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If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.
Toni Morrison
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You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.
Toni Morrison
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Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.
Toni Morrison
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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.
Toni Morrison
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I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.
Toni Morrison
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Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.
Toni Morrison
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You are your best thing
Toni Morrison
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The function of freedom is to free someone else.
Toni Morrison
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If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.
Toni Morrison
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As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.
Toni Morrison
More Toni Morrison Quotes
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She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.
Toni Morrison
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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.
Toni Morrison
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We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
Toni Morrison
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All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.
Toni Morrison
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Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.
Toni Morrison
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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.
Toni Morrison
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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.
Toni Morrison
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I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.
Toni Morrison
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How soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like forever. As though there never was a time when they didn't love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves.
Toni Morrison
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The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.
Toni Morrison
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Birth, life, and deathâ each took place on the hidden side of a leaf.
Toni Morrison
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When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.
Toni Morrison
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Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face; you are me.
Toni Morrison
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Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can't nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.
Toni Morrison