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Toni Morrison Quotes

"We commit ourselves to language and community at the same time""All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in""Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation""If you can only be tall because somebody's on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And my feeling is, white people have a very, very serious problem""Racism will disappear when it's no longer profitable and no longer psychologically useful. When that happens, it'll be gone""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""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'""Something that is loved is never lost""The function of evil is to divide, separate""What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not""The loneliest woman in the world is the woman without a close woman friend""Not knowing it was hard; knowing it was harder""Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge""You are not the work you do, you are the person you are""As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think""Don't ever think I fell for you or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it""Some things you forget. Other things you never do""Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be""We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives""It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love. Love shouldn't be like that"
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