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" Fighting, I guess, was never the real reason I read comic books as a kid. The fighting was an important part, an integral part of it; I don't know I would've read it without it. "

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" I just want to be really clear about this: Anyone who has read Colin Powell's biography - there's an entire section where he talks about experiencing segregation. Colin Powell did not appear when he became head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That's not how it happened. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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" 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. "

" I write what I write in the way that I write it. I'm not being abstract, you know. I'm talking about something that, you know, is a part of my life. "

" With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage. An unsegregated America might see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular bias toward skin color. Instead, the concentration of poverty has been paired with a concentration of melanin. "

" I wouldn't argue that Mitt Romney is a white supremacist. "

" For nearly a century and a half, this country deluded itself into thinking that its greatest calamity, the Civil War, had nothing to do with one of its greatest sins, enslavement. It deluded itself in this manner despite available evidence to the contrary. "

" I was born in West Baltimore, lived in a situation in which violence was everywhere. "

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

" One can say Senator Sanders should have more explicit antiracist policy within his racial justice platform, not just more general stuff, and still cast a vote for Senator Sanders and still feel that Senator Sanders is the best option that we have in the race. "

" The mainstream sort of presentation of the civil rights movement was not something that I directly inherited. "

" There's no way to understand housing as it exists today without federal policy. "

" 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. "

" I had no expectations of white people at all. "

" You can't tolerate anybody attempting to threaten or intimidate your body. You must respond with force. "

" Amiri Baraka went to Howard. Lucille Clifton went to Howard. Ossie Davis went to Howard. And I was aware of that when I was there. Charles Drew went to Howard. Thurgood Marshall went to the law school. Being aware of that and having all of that brought to bear, again, it's one of those things that I can't really separate from my career as a writer. "

" My job is to look out on that world that I write about and be as honest as I possibly can about that world. If that's optimistic and uplifting, OK. If it's not, OK. "

" I love living around black people. Home is home. We suffer under racism and the physical deprivations that come with that, but beneath that, we form cultures and traditions that are beautiful. "

" I had to learn to not be so hard. And I had a wife and, at that time, a partner when Samori was born, and for most of Samori's life, a partner, who, for whatever reason, did not have to learn that and was very tender and very, very soft with him. "

" Obama's presence opened a new field for writers, and what began as curiosity about the man himself eventually expanded into curiosity about the community he had so consciously made his home and all the old, fitfully slumbering questions he'd awakened about American identity. "

" I have never read 'To Kill A Mockingbird.' "

" When people hear the term 'political prisoner,' especially on the Left, it becomes a kind of abstraction. Folks are aware of injustice, and they're aware that there are folks in prison who are in prison, you know, largely because of their activism. "

" American myths have never been colorless. "

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

" The thing people have to remember is there's nothing natural about racism as it exists in America. I mean, we know this historically. We can look at 1619, when Africans first came here, and how early African slaves intermixed pretty indiscriminately with indentured white servants. "

" My belief is in the chaos of the world and that you have to find your peace within the chaos and that you still have to find some sort of mission. "

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

" Long view of history shows evil triumphing more often than we'd like to admit. That's just how it is. I don't despair too much about dying, either. It's just a fact of being human. "

" I've been very, very careful to tell people what I am qualified to talk about and what I'm not qualified to talk about. "

" Many, many people of the Revolutionary generation, the generation that fought in the Revolutionary War, understood that slavery was somehow in contradiction to what America was saying it was. And many of those folks also, at the very least, gave land to African Americans when they were liberated. "

" I constantly write about my safety walking to and from school, and then I would come home at night, and I would cut on the TV, and I would watch a show like 'The Wonder Years,' or I would watch, you know, some other show like 'Family Ties.' "