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Language Quotes by Toni Morrison

32 Language quotes by Toni Morrison

All Language quotes Toni Morrison’s page

Morrison’s thoughts on language read like a deep‑rooted conversation, where each sentence carries the weight of history and the promise of change. Her words weave together personal memory and collective experience, inviting you to feel the texture of spoken and unspoken narratives.

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“You revel in the smoke that the words send up.”

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If we had no language we'd have nothing.

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“She heard it as though it were what language was made for”

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When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.

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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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The language must be careful and must appear effortless. It must not sweat. It must suggest and be provocative at the same…

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Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.

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Maybe [I care about language] because I'm an editor, maybe because I'm picky, but it's all we got, don't shrink it. Don't…

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“Language, when it finally comes, has the vigor of a felon pardoned after twenty-one years on hold. Sudden, raw, stripped to its…

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Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.

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The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers.

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You rely on a sentence to say more than the denotation and the connotation; you revel in the smoke that the words…

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This word "LOVE" - discredited, "clicheed" - can be restored and love, the instinct, the impulse to care for somebody in the…

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Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not, permit new…

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“We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the…

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Word-work is sublime... because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference-the way in which we are…

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The theme you choose may change or simply elude you, but being your own story means you can always choose the tone.…

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I have difficulties with contemporary language. Big difficulties. I counted, you know, something like 160 words have disappeared from the English language…

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I'm a writer in the world. I translate the confusion that I might feel, the dread that I know I feel, moving…

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What do you say? There really are no words for that. There really aren't. Somebody tries to say, 'I'm sorry, I'm so…

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A dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis.…

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It's important, therefore, to know who the real enemy is, and to know the function, the very serious function of racism, which…

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It's always seemed to me that black people's grace has been with what they do with language. In Lorrain, Ohio, when I…

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She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only…

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The function, the very serious function of racism, is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over…

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“Their conversation is like a gently wicked dance: sound meets sound, curtsies, shimmies, and retires. Another sound enters but is upstaged by…

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“The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for…

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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…

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We're all surrounded by what I call faux language, fake language of commerce, of news media.

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“Language can never 'pin down' slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its…

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There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write,…

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One has to work very carefully with what is in between the words. What is not said. Which is measure, which is…

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More by Toni Morrison

Perhaps that's what all human relationships boiled down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?

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There, in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had…

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In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent.

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“Not know it was hard;knowing it was harder”

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“Didn’t everything on God’s earth have or acquire defense?”

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If you can't count, they can cheat you. If you can't read, they can beat you.

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“You looked at them and wondered why the were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that…

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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…

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For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end.…

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“To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay”

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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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“You know how a star is supposed to twinkle? We say twinkle because that is how it looks, but when a star feels itself,…

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“There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks”

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My father saw two black men lynched on his street in Cartersville, as a child. And I think seeing two black businessmen - not…

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“She was fierce in the presence of death, heroic even, as she was at no other time. Its threat gave her direction, clarity, audacity.”

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