Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" Chaos is what we have. That is what I believe. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Related Quotes:

" I think the body is the ultimate thing. The soul and mind are part of the body. I don't think there is anything outside of that. Your physical self is who you are. Some people feel that that is reductionist, but I don't think it is. It's just true. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" American myths have never been colorless. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" Black people are pledging their fealty to the state, and yet they aren't getting the same return. This is theft. It's systemized. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" Eddie Conway is central to my first memories. My parents used to take me to, when it was open, the Baltimore city penitentiary to see Eddie Conway - I was talking to my dad about this recently - from the time I might have been one or two years old. I mean, literally, my first memories are of black men in jail, specifically of Eddie Conway. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" Outside of hip-hop, it was in comics that I most often found the aesthetics and wisdom of my world reflected. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" Every writer dreams of having the ability to hold forth for 8,000 words and pull all these different forms together: history, reportage, journalism. That was all I really wanted, and 'The Atlantic' was my first high-profile opportunity. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" People know things and have a remarkable capacity to act in their individual immediate interests all the time. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" I don't know that white people need to be 'allies' so much as understand that any black struggle in America is ultimately a struggle for the large country. 'Ally' presumes a kind of distance that I am not sure exists. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" I'm not going to break up my family, not for a book. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" Barack Obama's victories in 2008 and 2012 were dismissed by some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans. But there is nothing 'mere' about symbols. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" I was about 13 or 14 when I heard Malcolm X's speech 'Message to the Grass Roots.' "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" There's a kind of optimism specifically within Christianity about the world - about whose side God is on. Well, I didn't have any of that in my background. I had physicality and chaos. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" Storytellers have the right to answer any question they choose. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" The country in which reparations actually happen is a very different one than the one we live in. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" When 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

" You can't make a direct comparison between middle-class African Americans and middle-class white Americans, affluent African Americans and affluent white Americans. The amount of wealth tends to be less. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" I think a lot about the private emotions of black people - what we feel and yet is rarely publicly expressed. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" Life is always a problem. The fact that I'm on the radio saying that I don't necessarily see hope does not relieve people, does not relieve my son, does not relieve children, of the responsibility to struggle. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" When 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

" When you know that people know who you are, you are always working - and not the work you want to do. You are sort of performing, because you know they are looking - or at least glancing - at you. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" People review my comic books. People review every article I write - 'The Atlantic' even publishes them. A great deal of the critique of 'Between the World and Me' was from a feminist perspective. bell hooks pushed back, among others. Some of that has value. Some of it does not. I try my best to separate the wheat from the chaff. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" My father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat me as if someone might steal me away, because that was exactly what was happening all around us. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" Somebody once told me, black people, in and of themselves, are cosmopolitan. There's cosmopolitanism within the black experience. There's an incredible amount. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" The African-American tradition, in the main, is very, very church-based, very, very Christian. It accepts, you know, certain narratives about the world. I didn't really have that present in my house. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" I'm a writer. My job is to speak what - that which I think is true. If that bridges the gap, that's good. If it doesn't, that's too bad. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" It was mostly through pop culture, through hip-hop, through Dungeons & Dragons and comic books that I acquired much of my vocabulary. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" The relationship between violence and nonviolence in this country is interesting. The fact of the matter is, you know, people do respond to riots. The 1968 Housing Act was in large response to riots that broke out after Dr. Martin Luther King was killed. They cited these as an actual inspiration. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" From last century's 'The Birth of a Nation' to this century's 'Gods and Generals,' Hollywood has likely done more than any other American institution to obstruct a truthful apprehension of the Civil War and, thus, modern America's very origins. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" I would say as a journalist, I would envision travelling to other countries that have had to reckon with their past and see how they've done it: what worked, what didn't work, finding characters that would tell the story of how that process was done. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" We want to believe racism is an artifact of the past, and if you have a political massacre, that contradicts that. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates