(Chloe Ardelia Wofford)
Story-telling voice of American wisdom
Novelist, professor, and essayist; Toni Morrison became Random House's first black woman editor. She consistently and insightfully addressed issues like race, feminism, white supremacy, and politics without fixating on extremes and while always keeping on open view. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Pulitzer, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Book Award, and she was chosen for the Jefferson Lecture—the U.S. government's highest honor for accomplishment in the humanities. President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of FreedomLineages
American (USA) Black Christian Women of Wisdom
A Humanist View (1975)
Beloved (1987)
Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)
Paradise (1997)
Tar Baby (1981)
The Guardian
“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. No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to.”
from Tar Baby (1981)
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“An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.”
from Tar Baby (1981)
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“Anger... it's a paralyzing emotion... you can't get anything done... — it's helpless, it's absence of control — it's not useful”
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“In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.”
from The Guardian
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“No one can blame the conqueror for writing history the way he sees it, and certainly not for digesting human events and discovering their patterns according to his own point of view. But it must be admitted … that conventional history supports and complements a very grave and almost pristine ignorance.”
from A Humanist View (1975)
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“Because the very nature of history is to make large distinctions, it encourages the intellect, therefore, to forgo finer ones... If such history continues to be the major informer of our sensibilities, we will remain functionally unintelligent.”
from A Humanist View (1975)
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“it is the ability to make distinctions—and the smaller the distinctions made, the higher the intellect that makes them—by which we judge intellect.”
from A Humanist View (1975)
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“We are the moral inhabitants of the globe. And to deny it is to lie in prison... And unless all races and all ages of man have been totally deluded, there seems to be such a thing as grace, such a thing as beauty, such a thing as harmony — all of which are wholly free, and available to us.”
from A Humanist View (1975)
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“to continue to see a race of people, any race of people as one single personality is an ignorance of gothic proportions, an ignorance so vast, so public, and perception so blind and so blunted, imagination so bleak that no nuance, no subtlety, no difference among them can be ascertained.”
from A Humanist View (1975)
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“Couples that enter the sacrament of marriage and are not prepared to go the distance or are not willing to get right with the real love of God cannot thrive. They may cleave together like robins or gulls or anything else that mates for life. But if they eschew this mighty course, at the moment when all are judged for the disposition of their eternal lives, their cleaving won't mean a thing.”
from Paradise (1997)
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“Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God”
from Paradise (1997)
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“Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.”
from Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)
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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... it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference — the way in which we are like no other life.”
from Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)
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“Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.”
from Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)
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“You don’t waste your energy fighting the fever; you must only fight the disease. And the disease is not racism. It is greed and the struggle for power.”
from A Humanist View (1975)
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“The concept of freedom did not emerge in a vacuum. Nothing highlighted freedom—if it did not fact create it—like slavery.”
from Beloved (1987)
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“What she called the nastiness of life was the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children.”
from Beloved (1987)
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“This writer enlarged the American imagination in ways we are only beginning to understand.”
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“Toni Morrison's prose brings us that kind of moral and emotional intensity that few writers ever attempt.”
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