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" I'm always annoyed about why black people have to bear the brunt of everybody else's contempt. If we are not totally understanding and smiling, suddenly we're demons. "
Toni Morrison
Demons
Understanding
Black
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" I like marriage. The idea. "
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" 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. "
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" It's been mentioned or suggested that Paradise will not be well studied, because it's about this unimportant intellectual topic, which is religion. "
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" Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all. "
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" No one ever talks about the moment you found that you were white. Or the moment you found out you were black. That's a profound revelation. The minute you find that out, something happens. You have to renegotiate everything. "
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" Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich inherit it. I don't mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network. "
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" Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers. "
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" Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth. "
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" 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. "
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" Schools must stop being holding pens to keep energetic young people off the job market and off the streets. We stretch puberty out a long, long time. "
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" You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone. "
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" I get angry about things, then go on and work. "
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" You marvel at the economy and this choice of words. How many ways can you describe the sky and the moon? After Sylvia Plath, what can you say? "
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" Women's rights is not only an abstraction, a cause; it is also a personal affair. It is not only about us; it is also about me and you. Just the two of us. "
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" In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it's nothing else but color. "
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" If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, you must be the one to write it. "
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" Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it. "
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" Nelson Mandela is, for me, the single statesman in the world. The single statesman, in that literal sense, who is not solving all his problems with guns. It's truly unbelievable. "
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" There is nothing of any consequence in education, in the economy, in city planning, in social policy that does not concern black people. "
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" If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression. "
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" I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it. "
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Wrote
First
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" The unflattering reviews are painful for short periods of time; the badly written ones are deeply, deeply insulting. That reviewer took no time to really read the book. "
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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. "
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" When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same. "
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" My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren't my children. "
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" I merged those two words, black and feminist, because I was surrounded by black women who were very tough and and who always assumed they had to work and rear children and manage homes. "
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" Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city. "
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" Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another. "
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