Quotes by Ta-Nehisi Coates

i think one has to even abandon the phrase ally and understand that you are not helping someone in a particular struggle; the fight is yours.

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.

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 peoples interests. The library is open, unending, free.

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.

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 I see the Confederate flag, I see the attempt to raise an empire in slavery. It really, really is that simple. I dont understand how anybody with any sort of education on the Civil War can see anything else.

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

One of the things we tell ourselves as African-Americans is if we work hard, play by the rules, we do start back a little ways, but if we can be twice as good, somehow we can escape history and heritage and legacy.

We have this long history of racism in this country, and as it happens, the criminal justice system has been perhaps the most prominent instrument for administering racism. But the racism doesnt actually come from the criminal justice system.

There was no United States before slavery. I am sure somebody can make some sort of argument about modern French identity and slavery and North Africa, but there simply is no American history before black people.

Racism is a physical experience.

There are African-American families around this country - a large, large number of African-American families - that operate out of complete fear that their kids are going to be taken from them and will do anything to prevent that.

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

Forgiveness is a big part of - especially post-civil rights movement - is a big part of African-American Christianity, and I wasnt raised within the Christian church; I wasnt raised within any church.

Superheroes are best imagined in comic books. The union between the written word, the image, and then what your imagination has to do to connect those allows for so much.

When I see Bruce Banner becoming the Hulk, its only a picture. My imagination has to do some of the work there, to impute feeling and everything. Were talking about something thats so surreal, its just not possible within the world as we know it. So that requires a form that is not so literal.

Outside of hip-hop, it was in comics that I most often found the aesthetics and wisdom of my world reflected.