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beee258
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It's gonna hurt, now," said Amy. "Anything dead coming back to life hurts." --
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Toni Morrison |
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bb39968
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You your own best thing, Sethe. You are.
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self-esteem
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Toni Morrison |
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86cd50a
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When they fall in love with a city it is for 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. And in the beginning when they first arrive, and twenty years later when they..
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Toni Morrison |
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b9c6289
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He said, 'Always. Always.
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Toni Morrison |
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c2f25c5
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There is a difference between being put out and being put outdoors. If you are put out, you go somewhere else; if you are outdoors, there is no place to go. The distinction was subtle but final. Outdoors was the end of something, an irrevocable, physical fact, defining and complementing our metaphysical condition... Dead doesn't change, and outdoors is here to stay.
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Toni Morrison |
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a8f76cb
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I've traveled. All over. I've never seen anything like you. How could anything be put together like you? Do you know how beautiful you are? Have you looked at yourself?' 'I'm looking now.
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seeing
love
see
eyes
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Toni Morrison |
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855a5be
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Sad as it was that she did not know where her children were buried or what they looked like if alive, fact was she knew more about them than she knew about herself, having never had the map to discover what she was like. Could she sing? (Was it nice to hear when she did?) Was she pretty? Was she a good friend? Could she have been a loving mother? A faithful wife? Have I got a sister and does she favor me? If my mother knew me would she like..
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Toni Morrison |
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5fdb81c
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Maybe that was love. Choking sounds and silence.
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Toni Morrison |
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5762981
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The narrower their lives, the wider their hips.
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Toni Morrison |
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ff7705d
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they ran in the sunlight, creating their own breeze which pressed their dresses into their damp skin. Reaching a kind of square of four locked trees which promised cooling; they flung themselves into the shade to taste their lip sweat and contemplate the wildness that had come upon them so suddenly
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Toni Morrison |
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f856dca
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Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed," she said, "and broke my heartstrings too. There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks."
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racism
blacks
whites
race-relations
luck
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Toni Morrison |
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f1ab175
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Much handled things are always soft(27).
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Toni Morrison |
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fdf562a
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Each night, without fail, she prayed for blue eyes. Fervently, for a year she had prayed. Although somewhat discouraged, she was not without hope. To have something as wonderful as that would take a long, long time.
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Toni Morrison |
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6b71dd5
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They will blow it, she thought. Each will cling to a sad little story of hurt and sorrow--some long-ago trouble and pain life dumped on their pure and innocent selves. And each one will rewrite that story forever, knowing the plot, guessing the theme, inventing its meaning and dismissing its origin.
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Toni Morrison |
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54b5eb8
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A child. New life. Immune to evil or illness, protected from kidnap, beatings, rape, racism, insult, hurt, self-loathing, abandonment. Error-free. All goodness. Minus wrath. So they believe.
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Toni Morrison |
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3dd8501
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So this is what insanity is. Not goofy behavior, but watching a sudden change in the world you used to know.
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Toni Morrison |
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8b6aba2
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I know it's trash: just another story made up to scare wicked females and correct unruly children. But it's all I have. I know I need something else. Something better. Like a story that shows how brazen women can take a good man down. I can hum to that.
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women
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Toni Morrison |
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28b7029
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In a way, her strangeness, her naivete, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings; had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like any artist with no art f..
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boredom-to-brilliance
recklessness
idleness
curiosity
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Toni Morrison |
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b9dd879
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More than fear of loving bears or birds bigger than cows, I fear pathless nights. How, I wonder, can I find you in the dark?
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Toni Morrison |
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46c18fc
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Listen, baby, people do funny things. Specially us. The cards are stacked against us and just trying to stay in the game, stay alive and in the game, makes us do funny things. Things we can't help. Things that make us hurt one another. We don't even know why. But look here, don't carry it inside and don't give it to nobody else. Try to understand it, but if you can't, just forget it and keep yourself strong, man.
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Toni Morrison |
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4038953
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Their drift away from others produced a selfish privacy and they had lost the refuge and the consolation of a clan. Baptists, Presbyterians, tribe, army, family, some encircling outside thing was needed. Pride, she thought. Pride alone made them think that they needed only themselves, could shape life that way, like Adam and Eve, like gods from nowhere beholden to nothing except their own creations. She should have warned them, but her devo..
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solitude
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Toni Morrison |
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2721829
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She did not tell them to clean up their lives, or go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek, or its glory-bound pure. She told them that the only grace they could have is the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they could not have it.
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Toni Morrison |
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a415c22
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Then summer came. A summer limp with the weight of blossomed things. Heavy sunflowers weeping over fences; iris curling and browning at the edges far away from their purple hearts; ears of corn letting their auburn hair wind down to their stalks. AND THE BOYS. The beautiful, beautiful boys who dotted the landscape like jewels, split the air with their shouts in the field, and thickened the river with their shining wet backs. EVEN THEIR FOOT..
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Toni Morrison |
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cd3db70
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No more running-from nothing. I will never run from another thing on this Earth. I took one journey and I paid for the ticket, but let me tell you something, Paul D. Garner: it cost too much!
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Toni Morrison |
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1b3c997
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Hate does that. Burns off everything but itself, so whatever your grievance is, your face looks just like your enemy's.
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Toni Morrison |
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a084116
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People who die bad don't stay in the ground.
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Toni Morrison |
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8cd3ec7
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All she saw, down in the cellar well beneath the stoop, was a light yellow feather with a tip of green. And she had never named him. Had called him "my parrot" all these years. "My parrot." "Love you. "Love you." Did the dogs get him? Or did he get the message - that she said, "My parrot" and he said, "Love you," and she had never said it back or even taken the trouble to name him - and manage somehow to fly away on wings that had not soare..
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Toni Morrison |
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0026097
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Shallow believers prefer a shallow God.
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Toni Morrison |
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dce726b
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I sold my elegant blackness to all those childhood ghosts and now they pay me for it.
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blackness
race-and-racism-in-america
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Toni Morrison |
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e041b90
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She was never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty, and the scale was one she absorbed in full from the silver screen.
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Toni Morrison |
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538723a
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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.
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Toni Morrison |
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2656a60
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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 particular business; you hope it is comfortable, but prefer, rather, that it be anonymous. It is not, after all, where you live. When you no longe..
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bluest-eye
toni
morrison
leaving
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Toni Morrison |
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94ca796
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It was becoming a habit-this concentration on things behind him. Almost as though there were no future to be had. *Milkman*
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Toni Morrison |
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2cc4e34
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Bryn Mawr had done what a four-year dose of liberal education was designed to do: unfit her for eighty percent of the useful work of the world.
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Toni Morrison |
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c6f55ae
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Pain was greedy; it demanded all of her attention.
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Toni Morrison |
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7b6ec3a
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This here Sethe talked about love like any other woman; talked about baby clothes like any other woman, but what she meant could cleave the bone. This here Sethe talked about safety with a handsaw. This here new Sethe didn't know where the world stopped and she began. Suddenly he saw what Stamp Paid wanted him to see: more important than what Sethe had done was what she claimed. It scared him.
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Toni Morrison |
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60812a9
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And in all those escapes he could not help being astonished by the beauty of this land that was not his. He his in its breast, fingered its earth for food, clung to its banks to lap water and tried not to love it. On nights when the sky was personal, weak with the weight of its own stars, he made himself not love it. Its graveyards and its low-lying rivers. Or just a house - solitary under a chinaberry tree; maybe a mule tethered and the li..
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earth
slavery
world
love
paul-d
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Toni Morrison |
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e2a7f20
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If he looked into her face, he would see those haunted, loving eyes. The hauntedness would irritate him -- the love would move him to fury. How dare she love him? Hadn't she any sense at all? What was he supposed to do about that? Return it? How? What could his calloused hands produce to make her smile? What of his knowledge of the world and of life could be useful to her? What could his heavy arms and befuddled brain accomplish that would ..
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Toni Morrison |
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af76349
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Sula was distinctly different. Eva's arrogance and Hannah's self-indulgence merged in her and, with a twist that was all her own imagination, she lived out her days exploring her own thoughts and emotions, giving them full reign, feeling no obligation to please anybody unless their pleasure pleased her. As willing to feel pain as to give pain, to feel pleasure as to give pleasure, hers was an experimental life - ever since her mother's rema..
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Toni Morrison |
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7d8781a
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Can't nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.
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Toni Morrison |
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ef24e83
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What do you know about somebody not being good enough for somebody else? And since when did you care whether Corinthians stood up or fell down? You've been laughing at us all your life. Corinthians. Mama. Me. Using us, ordering us, and judging us: how we cook your food; how we keep your house. But now, all of a sudden, you have Corinthians' welfare at heart and break her up from a man you don't approve of. Who are you to approve or disappro..
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feminism
women
feminist
song-of-solomon
male-privilege
brother
son
mother
father
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Toni Morrison |
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a778159
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I am nothing to you. You say I am wilderness. I am. Is that a tremble on your mouth, in your eye? Are you afraid? You should be.
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Toni Morrison |
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9da8e95
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maybe you think up North is way different from down South. Don't believe it and don't count on it. Custom is just as real as law and can be just as dangerous.
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toni-morrison
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Toni Morrison |
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c250cbd
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Every Saturday morning, first thing before breakfast, his parents held conferences with their children requiring them to answer two questions put to each of them: 1. What have you learned that is true (and how do you know)? 2. What problem do you have?
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family
rituals
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Toni Morrison |