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Toni Morrison

94 quotesProfessor · Born Feb 18, 1931 · United States Of America · Female

Toni Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18, 1931) is an American novelist, editor, and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed characters. Among her best known novels are The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), and Beloved (1987). Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award in 1988 for Beloved. Beloved was adapted into a film of the same name (starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover) in 1998. Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. In 1996, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected her for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. She was honored with the 1996 National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Morrison was commissioned to write the libretto for a new opera, Margaret Garner, first performed in 2005. On May 29, 2012, Morrison received the Presidential Medal of Freedo

All Love (19)Relationships (14)Writing (7)Dating (6)Feelings (6)beauty (5)Happiness (4)Race Bias (4)Race and Ethnicity (4)Race relations (4)Sex (4)Future (3)Life (3)Alone (3)emotions (3)

From “The Bluest Eye (Vintage International)”

Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.

beauty Makeup Appearance

She left me the way people leave a hotel room. A hotel room is a place to be when you are doing something else. Of itself it is of no consequence to one's major scheme. A hotel room is convenient. But its convenience is limited to the time you need it while you are in that particular town on that…

Comfort convenience hotels Home

Lonely was much better than alone.

Lonely Alone Friendship Relationships

Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly.

Love stupidity Violence wicked

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.

beauty Love Envy Insecurity

Love is never any better than the lover.

Love Lover Relationships Dating

Quiet as it’s kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941.

first lines of books

I stretch my legs open, and he is on top of me. Too heavy to hold, and too light not to. He puts his thing in me. In me. In me. I wrap my feet around his back so he can’t get away. His face is next to mine. The bedsprings sounds like them crickets used to back home. He puts his fingers in mine, and…

Sex Love

From “The Bluest Eye”

I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer – its dust and lowering skies.

Summer Summer Fruit Beautiful Summer Summer Feels

From “ Song of Solomon”

You think because he doesn’t love you that you are worthless. You think that because he doesn’t want you anymore that he is right — that his judgement and opinion of you are correct. If he throws you out, then you are garbage. You think he belongs to you because you want to belong to him. Don’t.…

Love Relationships Dating romance inspiration

From “Toni Morrison Schools Colbert On Race In America”

There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race. Scientifically, anthropologically, racism is a construct — a social construct. And it has benefits. Money can be made off of it, and people who don’t like themselves can feel better because of it. It can describe certain kinds of…

Black Lives Matter (C1)racism

From “Paradise (Vintage International)”

How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.

Happiness Imagination Goals

Love is divine only and difficult always.

Love divine difficult Relationships

They shoot the white girl first.

first lines of books

From “Sula”

Seeing her step so easily from the pantry and emerge looking precisely as she did when she entered, only happier, taught Sula that sex was pleasant and frequent, but otherwise unremarkable.

Sex Happiness unremarkable

It had been the longest time since she had had a rib-scraping laugh. She had forgotten how deep and down it could be. So different from the miscellaneous giggles and smiles she had learned to be content with these past few years.

Laughter giggling Happiness

Being good to somebody is just like being mean to somebody. Risky. You don't get nothing for it.

meanness kindness risks

It was not death or dying that frightened him, but the unexpectedness of both. In sorting it all out, he hit on the notion that if one day a year were devoted to it, everybody could get it out of the way and the rest of the year would be safe and free. In this manner he instituted National Suicide…

Death Dying Suicide Safe

Every now and then she looked around for tangible evidence of his having ever been there. Where were the butterflies? The blueberries? The whistling reed? She could find nothing, for he had left nothing but his stunning absence.

Gone Dating Men Alone

The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.

Evil Survival Triumph Win

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