Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes

I feel sorry for people who only know comic books through movies. I really do.

I don’t so much hope that any reader “agrees” with me, as I hope to haunt them, to trouble their sense of how things actually are.

Serious history was the West, and the West was white.

On our life map, he drew a bright circle around twelve through eighteen. This was the abyss where, unguided, black boys were swallowed whole, only to reemerge on corners and prison tiers.

What did I know of loving anything, beyond a longing, beyond being biased in one woman's direction.

She had wanted her son to stand for what he believed and to be respectful. And he had died for believing his friends had a right to play their music loud, to be American teenagers.

No matter was the professional talkers tell you, I never met a black boy who wanted to fail.

I found that the same softness which once made me a target now compelled people to trust me with their stories.

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

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

In a country authored and sustained by criminal irresponsibility.

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.

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.

When you read a comic book, there's a space between what's happening on the panel and what you have to literally see in your mind. That's not true of movies, where you see everything.

I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.