Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" 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. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Bear

Career

Law

" 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. "

" The Ku Klux Klan is the most profligate domestic terrorist organization in this country's history. "

" It is, I think, the very chaos of America that allowed me to prosper. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Chaos

America

" Well into the 20th century, black people spoke of their flight from Mississippi in much the same manner as their runagate ancestors had. "

" American myths have never been colorless. "

" You don't make a case for reparations thinking, 'Oh yeah, people are gonna love this.' I didn't see that coming. "

" Like a lot of people, I'm very, very concerned about Senator Clinton's record. I'm very, very concerned about where her positions were in the 1990s, when we had some of the most disgusting legislation in terms of our criminal justice, really, in this country's history. "

" I don't completely understand why people in Aspen want to hear what I have to say. "

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

" Germany has spent the decades since World War II in national penance for Nazi crimes. America spent the decades after the Civil War transforming Confederate crimes into virtues. It is illegal to fly the Nazi flag in Germany. The Confederate flag is enmeshed in the state flag of Mississippi. "

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

" One of the things that's really, really present in 'Between the World and Me' is, I am in some ways outside of the African-American tradition. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Tradition

Present

" The casualties in the Civil War amount to more than all other wars - all other American wars combined. More people died in that war than World War II, World War I, Vietnam, etc. And that was a war for white supremacy. It was a war to erect a state in which the basis of it was the enslavement of black people. "

" You can oppose reparations all you want, but you got to know the facts. You really, really do. "

" 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. "

" It is said that Obama speaks 'professorially,' a fact that understates the quickness and agility of his mind. "

" 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. "

" It's very hard to be black in this country and hate America. It's really hard to live like that. I would actually argue it's impossible to fully see yourself. "

" I just think that if one is going to preach nonviolence and one is going to advocate for nonviolence, one's standard should be consistent. "

" When I grew up in West Baltimore, anything associated - and I'm talking about my childhood - with white people 99 percent of the time was something malevolent, like it was an explanatory force for something bad. "

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

" If I have to jump six feet to get the same thing that you have to jump two feet for - that's how racism works. "

" If I wrote a Jewish superhero, he'd have awesome time-traveling powers. I'd call him Doctorow. "

" 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. "

" I try to write in a way that makes people feel things. "

" 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. "

" Rates of black poverty have decreased. Black teen-pregnancy rates are at record lows - and the gap between black and white teen-pregnancy rates has shrunk significantly. But such progress rests on a shaky foundation, and fault lines are everywhere. "

" 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. "

" 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

Experience

Black