01c. 1975 ADThe last slaveholder has been dead for a very long time. The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer. To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism à la carte.Ta-Nehisi Coates / quote ↗
02c. 1975 ADShe had wanted her son to stand for what he believed and to be respectful. And he had died for believing his friends had a right to play their music loud, to be American teenagers.Ta-Nehisi Coates / quote ↗
03c. 1975 ADNo matter was the professional talkers tell you, I never met a black boy who wanted to fail.Ta-Nehisi Coates / quote ↗
04c. 1975 ADI found that the same softness which once made me a target now compelled people to trust me with their stories.Ta-Nehisi Coates / quote ↗
05c. 1975 ADI know now that all people hunger for a noble, unsullied past, that as sure as the black nationalist dreams of a sublime Africa before the white man's corruption, so did Thomas Jefferson dream of an idyllic Britain before the Normans, so do all of us dream of some other time when things were so simple. I know now that that hunger is a retreat from the knotty present into myth and that what ultimately awaits those who retreat into fairy tales, who seek refuge in the mad pursuit to be made great again, in the image of greatness that never was, is tragedy.Ta-Nehisi Coates / quote ↗
06c. 1975 ADi think one has to even abandon the phrase "ally" and understand that you are not helping someone in a particular struggle; the fight is yours.Ta-Nehisi Coates / quote ↗
07c. 1975 ADThis is one of those stories where the feeling of the moment stands in for visual details.Ta-Nehisi Coates / quote ↗
08c. 1975 ADThe universe was playing with loaded dice, which insured an excess of cowards in our ranks.Ta-Nehisi Coates / quote ↗
09c. 1975 ADIn a country authored and sustained by criminal irresponsibility.Ta-Nehisi Coates / quote ↗
10c. 1975 ADThe pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free. Slowly, I was discovering myself.Ta-Nehisi Coates / quote ↗
11c. 1975 ADI was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library is open, unending, free.Ta-Nehisi Coates / quote ↗
12c. 1975 ADI thought of the great spectrum of The Mecca--black people from Belize, black people with Jewish mothers, black people with fathers from Bangalore, black people from Toronto and Kingston, black people who spoke Russian, who spoke Spanish, who played Mongo Santamaría, who understood mathematics and sat up in bone labs, unearthing the mysteries of the enslaved. There was more out there than I had ever hoped for, and I wanted you to have it. I wanted you to know that the world in its entirety could never be found in schools, alone, nor on the streets, alone, nor in the trophy case. I wanted you to claim the whole world, as it is. I wanted "Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus" to immediately be obvious to you.Ta-Nehisi Coates / quote ↗
13c. 1975 ADThis is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.Ta-Nehisi Coates / quote ↗
14c. 1975 ADWhen I see the Confederate flag, I see the attempt to raise an empire in slavery. It really, really is that simple. I don't understand how anybody with any sort of education on the Civil War can see anything else.Ta-Nehisi Coates / quote ↗
15c. 1975 ADWhen you read a comic book, there's a space between what's happening on the panel and what you have to literally see in your mind. That's not true of movies, where you see everything.Ta-Nehisi Coates / quote ↗
16c. 1975 ADOne of the things we tell ourselves as African-Americans is if we work hard, play by the rules, we do start back a little ways, but if we can be twice as good, somehow we can escape history and heritage and legacy.Ta-Nehisi Coates / quote ↗
17c. 1975 ADWe have this long history of racism in this country, and as it happens, the criminal justice system has been perhaps the most prominent instrument for administering racism. But the racism doesn't actually come from the criminal justice system.Ta-Nehisi Coates / quote ↗
18c. 1975 ADThere was no United States before slavery. I am sure somebody can make some sort of argument about modern French identity and slavery and North Africa, but there simply is no American history before black people.Ta-Nehisi Coates / quote ↗
20c. 1975 ADThere are African-American families around this country - a large, large number of African-American families - that operate out of complete fear that their kids are going to be taken from them and will do anything to prevent that.Ta-Nehisi Coates / quote ↗
21c. 1975 ADI feel sorry for people who only know comic books through movies. I really do.Ta-Nehisi Coates / quote ↗
22c. 1975 ADForgiveness is a big part of - especially post-civil rights movement - is a big part of African-American Christianity, and I wasn't raised within the Christian church; I wasn't raised within any church.Ta-Nehisi Coates / quote ↗
23c. 1975 ADSuperheroes are best imagined in comic books. The union between the written word, the image, and then what your imagination has to do to connect those allows for so much.Ta-Nehisi Coates / quote ↗
24c. 1975 ADWhen I see Bruce Banner becoming the Hulk, it's only a picture. My imagination has to do some of the work there, to impute feeling and everything. We're talking about something that's so surreal, it's just not possible within the world as we know it. So that requires a form that is not so literal.Ta-Nehisi Coates / quote ↗
