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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 4430946 | you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all. This is not despair. These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| bf9a315 | You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body. That | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 52961f9 | 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 the schools, alone, nor on the streets, alone, nor in the trophy case. I wanted you to claim the whole world, as it is. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 18b3252 | Disembodiment is a kind of terrorism, and the threat of it alters the orbit of all our lives and, like terrorism, this distortion is intentional. Disembodiment. The dragon that compelled the boys I knew, way back, into extravagant theater of ownership. Disembodiment. The demon that pushed the middle-class black survivors into aggressive passivity, our conversation restrained in public quarters, our best manners on display, our hands never o.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 8197ab1 | Tarik | Garth Nix | ||
| 68b2639 | It did not occur to me that writing is always some form of interpretation, some form of translating the specificity of one's roots or expertise or even one's own mind into language that can be absorbed and assimilated into the consciousness of a broader audience. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 8ace5be | race" itself is just a restatement and retrenchment of the problem." | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| d0782c7 | The four million enslaved bodies, at the start of the Civil War, represented an inconceivable financial interest--$75 billion in today's dollars--and the cotton that passed through their hands represented 60 percent of the country's exports. In 1860, the largest concentration of multimillionaires in the country could be found in the Mississippi River Valley, where the estates of large planters loomed. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 015138f | For that more ennobling narrative, as for much of American history, the fact of black people is a problem. | white-supremacy | Ta-Nehisi Coates | |
| b6b0030 | I was growing, and if I could not name my anguish precisely I still knew there was nothing noble in it. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| e0b75d4 | It was strange to realize that after this night I would never see it again as it was. The room had never looked so beautiful as it did at that moment. | Nien Cheng | ||
| 88ce210 | There were honeys from across the city - Westport, Hollander Ridge, Gwynn Oak, Northwood. They were everything from redbone to yo-yo darkskin. The dimes among them carried Benetton bags, were dolled up like Lily Powers - finger waves, a head of dyed blond, and eyes like enchanted daggers. I saw we were outnumbered, as brothers who try the civilized way always are. | men-versus-women men-vs-women outnumbered | Ta-Nehisi Coates | |
| d69663c | This is the practiced habit of jabbing out one's eyes and forgetting the work of one's hands. To | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 862f0c0 | The writer, and that was what I was becoming, must be wary of every Dream and every nation, even his own nation. Perhaps his own nation more than any other, precisely because it was his own. I | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| a4df3ab | Now at night, I held you and a great fear, wide as all our American generations, took me. Now I personally understood my father and the old mantra - 'Either I can beat him or the police.' I understood it all - the cable wires, the extension cords, the ritual switch. Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered. I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you kill.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| e208e23 | You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 6646297 | Americans who think they are white regard us--something sexual and obscene. We were not enslaved in France. We are not their particular "problem," nor their national guilt. We are not their niggers. If there is any comfort in this, it is not the kind that I would encourage you to indulge. Remember your name. Remember that you and I are brothers, are the children of trans-Atlantic rape. Remember the broader consciousness that comes with that.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 8c4e992 | That he was outnumbered did not matter because the whole world had outnumbered him long ago, and what do numbers matter? | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 07c5562 | My wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 58d5245 | There will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been "black," and this points to the great difference between their world and ours. We did not choose our fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible. They are the ones who came up with a one-drop rule that separate.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 500ab57 | ours. By then I'd read Chancellor Williams, J. A. Rogers, and John Jackson--writers central to the canon of our new noble history. From them I knew that Mansa Musa of Mali was black, and Shabaka of Egypt was black, and Yaa Asantewaa of Ashanti was black--and "the black race" was a thing I supposed existed from time immemorial, a thing that was real and mattered." | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 7cd8939 | The illusion of wage and employment progress among African American males was made possible only through the erasure of the most vulnerable among them from the official statistics. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| cb9c243 | He rode upon a cherub, and did fly: yea, he did fly upon the wings of the wind. | Aeronautics | ||
| 2efa67e | No matter what the professional talkers tell you, I never met a black boy who wanted to fail. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 277633c | The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and girded me against the sheer terror of disembodiment. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| bd29c0f | An evil nature wielding great authority brings misfortune upon the community. | Aeschines | ||
| 3fc9ba2 | Community Oriented Policing (under the Department of Justice) will encourage, if not require, people to watch their neighbors and report suspicious activity. More activity will be identified as 'crime'--such as obesity, smoking, drinking when you have a drinking problem, name calling, leaving lights on, neglect (in someone's perception) of children, elderly, and pets, driving when you could ride a bike, breaking a curfew, and failure to do .. | Rosa Koire | ||
| 78b4364 | Morally and politically, in practice every liberal capitalist country has a solid record for being humane, for by and large respecting rights and freedoms, and for making it possible for people to put together fruitful and meaningful lives. Socialist practice has time and time again proved itself more brutal than the worst dictatorships in history prior to the twentieth century. Each socialist regime has collapsed into dictatorship and begu.. | Stephen R.C. Hicks | ||
| af1adcd | I saw another young man coming down the stairs from the third floor with my blanc de chine Goddess of Mercy, Guanyin, in his hand. [. . .] He swung the arm holding the Guanyin carelessly in the air and declared, 'This is a figure of Buddhist superstition. I'm going to throw it in the trash.' The Guanyin was a perfect specimen and a genuine product of the Dehua kiln in Fujian province. It was the work of the famous 17th century Ming sculptor.. | Nien Cheng | ||
| e8975e7 | It's always best to look ahead and not backwards. Possessions are not important. Think of those beautiful porcelain pieces I had. Before they came to me, they had all passed through the hands of many people, surviving wars and natural disasters. I got them only because someone else lost them. While I had them, I enjoyed them; now some other people will enjoy them. Life itself is transitory. Possessions are not important. | Nien Cheng | ||
| 7471694 | Another piece of the puzzle comes from author Peter Hessler's interview with Zhou Youguang (known as 'The Father of Pinyin'), in which Zhou suggests that it was a remark made by Stalin to Mao during a visit to the Soviet Union that caused the change of focus. | David Moser | ||
| 69e91ce | Look at America--children are taught to be independent and creative. In China, it's all about discipline. There isn't enough creativity, and if you don't have creativity, then you can't adapt and change. You just follow the same old patterns and you don't get any better. That | Peter Hessler | ||
| 6bec5f9 | In China, much of life involves skirting regulations, and one of the basic truths is that forgiveness comes easier than permission. | Peter Hessler | ||
| 6ccb197 | When you live in China as a foreigner, there are two critical moments of recognition. The first comes immediately upon arrival, when you are confronted with your own ignorance. Language, customs, history- all of it has to be learned, and the task seems impossible. Then, just as you begin to catch on, you realize that everybody else feels pretty much the same way. The place changes too fast; nobody in China has the luxury of being confident .. | Peter Hessler | ||
| c0020ca | Perhaps, then, unlikable characters, the ones who are the most human, are also the ones who are the most alive. | Roxane Gay | ||
| b6142f2 | When Chen Meizi had chosen her specialty, she didn't expect to find a job that matched her abilities; she expected to find new abilities that matched the available jobs. | Peter Hessler | ||
| abb53ac | Every always says that their product is the best," said Mr.Wang. "They have to talk about how much better they are than the competition, and usually they believe it. But the truth is that it's much easier once you realize that your product is inferior. Then you can focus on just doing business!" -- | Peter Hessler | ||
| 1dc1e47 | The decorating scheme of Big World is simple in theme but complicated in execution. The theme is: things that shine and things that make noise. There are mirrors and glass railings and columns of polished steel; there are beeping lights and blaring loudspeakers; there are more reflective surfaces here than on a disco ball. | Peter Hessler | ||
| 08e61e9 | mental institutions, rural health clinics. Once, he met | Peter Hessler | ||
| 1a9ab8e | For a Politeness Monitor, these responses seemed awfully terse and uncommunicative, but who was I to judge? | Peter Hessler | ||
| 13686f3 | I looked at the terraced hills and noticed how the people had changed the earth, taming it into dizzying staircases of rice paddies; but the Chinese looked at the people and saw how they have been shaped by the land. | Peter Hessler | ||
| 3161545 | MIMI HAD ARRANGED A spot for Wei Jia in the children's ward of the Peking University Health Center Number Three, | Peter Hessler | ||
| 388b1bc | a foreigner often feels most foreign while witnessing the early education of another culture. | Peter Hessler | ||
| 8cfccd6 | In the countryside, traditional parents avoid flattery, and the mother's responses were automatic--it was like knocking her knee with a rubber hammer. She didn't want to spoil the child, but there was also the Chinese superstition that pride attracts misfortune. | Peter Hessler |