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"I want to feel what I feel. What's mine. Even if it's not happiness, whatever that means. Because you're all you've got."
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"Oh, to awake from dreaming!"

"I will never tell another person, "I don't understand you... and why? Because if I say that, it means that I am disabled in a way. The inability to connect to another's perspective is, I believe, a disability."

"To cleave wood is a common every-day business, and yet it has its dangers; so then, reader, there are dangers connected with your calling and daily life which it will be well for you to be aware of. Your occupation may be as humble as log splitting, and yet the devil can tempt you in it. Nowhere is he safe who thinks himself so."

"At a Chamber of Commerce networking breakfast, two of my friends and I were standing in a circle talking. A stranger approached, interrupted our little reunion, and gave each of us her card. She then began talking about herself and her business without a hint of social awareness, or care about her interruption. She even had the tactless gall to ask us for referrals. When she left our small circle, we looked at each other and laughed, "What was that?"

"If you think everybody hates you, then your ignorance is beyond the limit, because there's a loving heart somewhere longing to see your face."

"Shattered edges of the diamonds rough sets to cut the unsuspecting."

"Vigilance of the wisest kind is to incessantly remain open to the reality that what I 'see' is but a single thread and solitary shard of what 'is', for to assume otherwise is to surrender the wisdom of vigilance to the decay of ignorance."

"The future is always unknown."
Explore more quotes by Toni Morrison


"I stood there a long while, staring at that tree. It looked so strongSo beautiful. Hurt right down the middleBut alive and well. Cee touched my shoulderLightly. Frank? Yes? Come on, brother. Let's go home."


"Criticism as a form of knowledge is capable of robbing literature not only of its own implicit and explicit ideology but of its ideas as well; it can dismiss the difficult, arduous work writers do to make an art that becomes and remains part of and significant within a human landscape."


"Dominion won by fear and secured by fear was still sweeter than any that could be got another way."


"Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it."


"Jump, if you want to, 'cause I'll catch you, girl. I'll catch you "fore you fall. Go as far inside as you need to, I'll hold your ankles. Make sure you get back out. I'm not saying this because I need a place to stay. That's the last thing I need. I told you, I'm a walking man, but I been heading in this direction for seven years. Walking all around this place. Upstate, downstate, east, west; I been in territory ain't got no name, never staying nowhere long. But when I got here and sat out there on the porch, waiting for you, well, I knew it wasn't the place I was heading toward; it was you. We can make a life, girl. A life."


"Where do you get the right to decide our lives? I'll tell you where. From that little hog's gut that hangs between your legs. Well, let me tell you something... you will need more than that. I don't know where you will get it or who will give it to you, but mark my words, you will need more than that.... You are a sad, pitiful, stupid, selfish, hateful man. I hope your little hog's gut stands you in good stead, and you take good care of it, because you don't have anything else."


"The Nobel Prize is the best thing that can happen to a writer in terms of how it affects your contracts, the publishers, and the seriousness with which your work is taken. On the other hand, it does interfere with your private life, or it can if you let it, and it has zero effect on the writing.It doesn't help you write better and if you let it, it will intimidate you about future projects."
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