1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
5443
5619
6757
6829
6830
6831
6832
6833
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 1bbafd6 | But more than any shame I feel about my own actual violence, my greatest regret was that in seeking to defend you I was, in fact, endangering you. "I could have you arrested," he said. Which is to say, "One of your son's earliest memories will be watching the men who sodomized Abner Louima and choked Anthony Baez cuff, club, tase, and break you." | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| bffe081 | We know how we will die--with cousins in double murder suicides, in wars that are mere theory to you, convalescing in hospitals, slowly choked out by angina and cholesterol. We are the walking lowest rung, and all that stands between us and beast, between us and the local zoo, is respect, the respect you take as natural as sugar and shit. We know what we are, that we walk like we are not long for this world, that this world has never longed.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| f968905 | Thandiwe, when they come for you, do not scream. Do not plead. Do not cry, for your cries are but song to them. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| f131326 | You deserved so much more, little flower. You deserved a Wakanda that cherished you." "But this is the Wakanda we have. And while the Midnight Angels breathe, I swear to you... they shall all pay." | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| af217a0 | The day after I became king, S'yan offered a single piece of wisdom. 'Power lies not in what a king does, but in what his subjects believe he might do.' This was profound. For it meant that the majesty of kings lay in their mystique... not in their might. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 94fff36 | I wish he'd told me not just of the power of kings, but of the might of the people. I wish he'd warned me that they, too, have secrets. They, too, have mysteries. They, too, possess a power of their own. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| cb0f850 | I was wrong. My enemy is not a beguiler, but a revealer. She brings out of us all the awful feelings that we have hidden away. And makes them manifest. So I know now that this is who I am. Might. Shame. Rage. And now they know, too. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 9fd56af | Every February my classmates and I were herded into assemblies for a ritual review of the Civil Rights Movement. Our teachers urged us toward the example of freedom marchers, Freedom Riders, and Freedom Summers, and it seemed that the month could not pass without a series of films dedicated to the glories of being beaten on camera. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 2ecb783 | The spirit and soul are the body and brain, which are destructible- that is precisely why they are so precious. And the soul did not escape. The spirit did not steal away on gospel wings. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 086dbae | In those years, hip-hop saved my life. I was still half alien to the people around me. I loved them, mostly because I'd realized that there was no other choice. Hip-hop gave me a common language, but that August, on liberated land, I found that there were other ways of speaking, a mother tongue that, no matter age, no matter interest, lived in us all. | music hip-hop | Ta-Nehisi Coates | |
| 58db627 | Sometimes it is subtle--the simple observation of who lives where and works what jobs and who does not. Sometimes it's all of it at once. I have never asked how you became personally aware of the distance. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 0472f54 | Ororo, I asked you to come because you are my best friend, and because..." "Because some things, my king, are easier to annual than others." -- | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 51bc840 | Her country crumbling to dust, and with broken men all around, Queen Shuri went off to her doom. I could have gone with her. But someone had to fight and someone had to live. And after we parted, I wondered- still wonder- how a man walks away and leaves his only sister to die. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| b7e719c | I know the danger. I know we may not come back, and in so doing, doom a nation. I would give my life for my nation. But I will not give the life of my sister. I will not, yet again, be parted from my own blood. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| d8372ef | These were the injuries, among any others, that Sologon- the so-called Buffalo Woman- was made to carry. But every dart endured, every torture tolerated, tempered her. Sologon grew strong. Ruthless. Hard. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| adba2c6 | I wonder if this is it. If I have finally flown too far from home. I think of Ramonda and Ororo. Zuri and W'Kabi. Father and S'yan. But above all, I think of you. and I think of dying out here, of drifting out here, in search of but far away from you. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 2734f2c | And I remember that I have come to bring you back, in the full ambition that it is you who will bring all of us back. What have you discovered here, Shuri? | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 8c22fed | Even in their final hours, my parents had hope. Once, they had put their hope in Wakanda. Now, they put their hope in Killmonger who would make Niganda great. Greater than even Wakanda. He promised them power and a country greater than any country in Africa. They were blinded by their desperate faith. Blinded by their hope. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 4410a39 | We live in a goal-oriented era. Our media vocabulary is full of hot takes, big ideas, and grand theories of everything. But some time ago I rejected magic in all its forms...In accepting both the chaos of history and the fact of my total end, I was freed to truly consider how i wished to live - specifically, how do I live free in this black body? It is a profound question because America understands itself as God's handwork, but the black b.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 725965a | The Dream is the same habit that endangers the planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos. I saw these ghettos driving back from Dr. Jones's home. They were the same ghettos I had seen in Chicago all those years ago, the same ghettos where my mother was raised, where my father was raised. Through the windshield I saw the mark of these ghettos--the abundance of beauty shops, churches, liquor stores, and cr.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| caa6b20 | 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. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 5e7e1d1 | I was only beginning to be wary of my own humanity, of my own hurt and anger--I didn't yet realize that the boot on your neck is just as likely to make you delusional as it is to ennoble. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| b3b9d63 | But this girl with the long dreads revealed something else--that love could be soft and understanding; that, soft or hard, love was an act of heroism. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 60275f1 | I felt that I had crossed some threshold, out of the foyer of my life and into the living room. Everything that was the past seemed to be another life. There was before you, and then there was after, and in this after, you were the God I'd never had. I submitted before your needs, and I knew then that I must survive for something more than survival's sake. I must survive for you. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 44ed481 | So you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 5e5fe3c | There are people whom we do not fully know, and yet they live in a warm place within us, and when they are plundered, when they lose their bodies and the dark energy disperses, that place becomes a wound. -- | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| f1efcf3 | The truth of us was always that you were our ring. We'd summoned you out of ourselves, and you were not given a vote. If only for that reason, you deserved all the protection we could muster. Everything else was subordinate to this fact. If that sounds like a weight, it shouldn't. The truth is that I owe you everything I have. Before you, I had my questions but nothing beyond my own skin in the game, and that was really nothing at all becau.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| d1a6b15 | If he could se me here, S'yan would remind me that the handlers of these men are dictators, despots, and strongmen. That their peace is the peace of the dead. I am a king. And while they derive their power from gun barrels, I derive mine from a god. Some days I wake up actually believing this. And every day I wake up knowing my people must believe this. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 2411c01 | Either you are a nation, or you are nothing. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 88f59c7 | She had never known her father, which put her in the company of the greater number of everyone I'd known. I felt then that these men - these 'fathers' - were the greatest of cowards. But I also felt that the galaxy was playing with loaded dice, which ensured an excess of cowards in our ranks. The girl from Chicago understood this too, and she understood something more - that all are not equally robbed of their bodies, that the bodies of wom.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 388c6f7 | I heard the fear in the first music I ever knew, the music that pumped from boom boxes full of grand boast and bluster. The boys...loved this music because it told them, against all evidence and odds, that they were masters of their own lives, their own streets, and their own bodies. I saw it in the girls, in their loud laughter, in their gilded bamboo earrings that announced their names thrice over. And I saw it in their brutal language an.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| c8043e9 | Unfit for the schools, and in good measure wanting to be unfit for them, and lacking the savvy I needed to master the streets, I felt there could be no escape for me or, honestly, anyone else. The fearless boys and girls who would knuckle up,c all on cousins and crews, and, if it came to it, pull guns seemed to have mastered the streets. But their knowledge peaked at seventeen, when they ventured out of their parents' homes and discovered t.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 577d752 | I was attracted to their guns, because the guns seemed honest. The guns seemed to address this country, which invented the streets that secured them with despotic police, in its primary language - violence. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| c42344c | This was why your grandparents banned Tarzan and the Lone Ranger and toys with white faces from the house. They were rebelling against the history books that spoke of black people only as sentimental "firsts" - first black five star general, first black congressman, first black mayor - always presented in the bemused manner of a category of Trivial Pursuit. Serious history was the West, and the West was white." | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| e0d5130 | Poetry aims for an economy of truth - loose and useless words bust be discarded, and I found that these loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts. Poetry was not simply the transcription of notions - beautiful writing rarely is. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 68d5cbe | How many awful poems did I write thinking of her? I know now what she was to me - the first glimpse of a space-bridge, a wormhole, a galactic portal of this bound and blind planet. She had seen other worlds, and she held the lineage of other worlds, spectacularly, in the vessel of her black body. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| aeeb5dc | Anyone can make a baby, but it takes a man to be a father.' This is what they had told me all my life. It was the language of survival, a myth that helped us cope with the human sacrifice that finds us no matter our manhood. As though our hands were ever our own. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| b991ec6 | Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. IT is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 76b8d70 | Some days I would take the train into Manhattan. There was so much money everywhere, money flowing out of bistros and cafes, money pushing the people at incredible speeds, up the wide avenues, money drawing intergalactic traffic through Times Square, money in the limestones and brownstones, money out on West Broadway where white people spilled out of wine bars with sloshing glasses and without police. I would see these people at the club, d.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| b0fa8d5 | The spirit and soul are the body and brain, which are destructible - that is precisely why they are so precious. And the soul did not escape. The spirit did not steal away on gospel wings. The soul was the body that fed the tobacco, and the spirit was the blood that watered the cotton, and these created the first fruits of the American garden. And the fruits were secured through the bashing of children with stove wood, through hot iron peel.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 7d0d286 | I have spent much of my studies searching for the right question by which I might fully understand the breach between the world and me. I have not spent my time studying the problem of 'race' - 'race' itself is just a restatement and retrenchment of the problem. You see this from time to time when some dullard - usually believing himself white - proposes that the way forward is a grand orgy of black and white, ending only when we are all be.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| b2c756c | Your route will be different. It must be. You knew things at eleven that I did not know when I was twenty-five. When I was eleven my highest priority was the simple security of my body. My life was the immediate negotiation of violence - within my house and without. But already you have expectations, I see that in you. Survival and safety are not enough. Your hopes - your dreams, if you will - leave me with an array of warring emotions. I a.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 872f2ca | As she talked of the church, I thought of your grandfather, the one you know, and how his first intellectual adventures were found in the recitation of Bible passages. I thought of your mother, who did the same. And I thought of my own distance from an institution that has, so often, been the only support for our people. I often wonder if in that distance I've missed something, some notions of cosmic hope, some wisdom beyond my mean physica.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 9e24f11 | The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all. The Dream is the same habit that endangers the planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos. I | Ta-Nehisi Coates |