Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes

I am sorry that I cannot make it okay. I am sorry that I cannot save you - but not that sorry. Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for othe...

Love could be soft and understanding; that, soft or hard, love was an act of heroism. And

I remember sitting in my seventh-grade French class and not having any idea why I was there. I did not know any French people, and nothing around me suggested I ever would. France was a rock rotating...

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 u...

You can no more be black like I am black than I could be black like your grandfather was.

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 women are set out for pillage in ways I could never tru...

She alluded to 12 Years a Slave. There he was, she said, speaking of Solomon Northup. He had means. He had a family. He was living like a human being. And one racist act took him back. And the same is...

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

I was a capable boy, intelligent, well-liked, but powerfully afraid. And I felt, vaguely, wordlessly, that for a child to be marked off for such a life, to be forced to live in fear was a great injust...

Our world is physical. Learn to play defense—ignore the head and keep your eyes on the body.

I read about Queen Nzinga who ruled in Central Africa in the 16th century resisting the Portuguese. I read about her negotiating with the Dutch. When the Dutch Ambassador tried to humiliate her by ref...

I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned in curiosity. They were concerned in compliance... 60% of all black men who drop out of school end up in jail. This should disgrace our country,...

Once when I was a tree, African sun woke me up green at dawn. African wind combed the branches of my hair. African rain washed my limbs. Once when I was a tree, flesh came and worshipped my roots. Fle...

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

What any institution, or its agents, intend for you is secondary. Our world is physical. Learn to play defense—ignore the head and keep your eyes on the body. Very few Americans will directly proclaim...

That I really was the wretch they made me out to be, and deserved no more than the abuses I received.

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 Egy...

In my survey course of America, I’d seen portraits of the Irish drawn in the same ravenous, lustful, and simian way. Perhaps there had been other bodies, mocked, terrorized, and insecure. Perhaps the...

Here is what I would like you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body -- it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor -- it is not so easy to g...

This part of the Obama formula is the most troubling, and least thought out. This judgment emerges from my own biography. I am the product of black parents who encouraged me to read, of black teachers...