Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes

For my people I have battled world-breakers, death cultists, and men who would make themselves gods. For my people, I lost the only woman I ever truly loved. There is nothing left, Mother. I have give...

For now the country holds to the common theory that emancipation and civil rights were redemptive, a fraught and still-incomplete resolution of the accidental hypocrisy of a nation founded by slavehol...

From hip-hop, I drew my earliest sense of what writing should mean. Grammar was never the point. Grammar was for the schoolmen and their television dreams. Out here, in the concrete and real, sentence...

He counseled vigilance, because the possibility of abuse by government officials always exists. The issue is not going to be that there are new tools available; the issue is making sure that the incom...

Here is how I take the measure of my progress in life: I imagine myself as I was, back there in

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...

I am speaking to you as I always have - as the sober and serious man I have always wanted you to be, who does not apologize for his human feelings, who does not make excuses for his height, his long a...

I did not love it, but I loved it. The fear I felt then was not just the anguish in my gut but the price of seeing the world anew.

I do remember watching Bill Clinton get impeached and Hillary Clinton being accused of killing Vince Foster, he said. And if you ask them, I’m sure they would say, ‘No, actually what you’re experienci...

I fell back on the old habits and logic of the street, where it was so often necessary to deny humiliation and transmute pain into rage. So I took the agony of that era like a collection notice and hi...

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,...

I had never seen a black man like Barack Obama. He talked to white people in a new language—as though he actually trusted them and believed in them. It was not my language.

I had never seen a black man like Barack Obama. He talked to white people in a new language—as though he actually trusted them and believed in them.

I had not yet been to Gettysburg. I had not read Thavolia Glymph. All I had was the feeling, the weight. I did not yet know, and I do not fully know now. But part of what I know ist hat there is the b...

I have no praise anthems, nor old Negro spirituals. The spirit and soul are the body and brain, which are destructible—that is precisely why they are so precious.

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,...

I kept thinking about how southern Manhattan had always been Ground Zero for us. They auctioned our bodies down there, in that same devastated, and rightly named, financial district. And there was onc...

I knew, even then, that whenever I nodded along in ignorance, I lost an opportunity, betrayed the wonder in me by privileging the appearance of knowing over the work of finding out.

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...

I tell you now that the question of how one should live within a black body, within a country lost in the Dream, is the question of my life, and the pursuit of this question, I have found, ultimately...