Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes

This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.

I thought of the great spectrum of The Mecca--black people from Belize, black people with Jewish mothers, black people with fathers from Bangalore, black people from Toronto and Kingston, black people who spoke Russian, who spoke Spanish, who played Mongo Santamaría, who understood mathematics and sat up in bone labs, unearthing the mysteries of the enslaved. 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 schools, alone, nor on the streets, alone, nor in the trophy case. I wanted you to claim the whole world, as it is. I wanted "Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus" to immediately be obvious to you.

The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. 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. Slowly, I was discovering myself.

I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library is open, unending, free.

In a country authored and sustained by criminal irresponsibility.

The universe was playing with loaded dice, which insured an excess of cowards in our ranks.

This is one of those stories where the feeling of the moment stands in for visual details.

I know now that all people hunger for a noble, unsullied past, that as sure as the black nationalist dreams of a sublime Africa before the white man's corruption, so did Thomas Jefferson dream of an idyllic Britain before the Normans, so do all of us dream of some other time when things were so simple. I know now that that hunger is a retreat from the knotty present into myth and that what ultimately awaits those who retreat into fairy tales, who seek refuge in the mad pursuit to be made great again, in the image of greatness that never was, is tragedy.