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Exlpore more Regret quotes
"Droll thing life is -- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself -- that comes too late -- a crop of inextinguishable regrets."
"All people at root are time optimists. We always think there's enough time to do things with other people. Time to say things to them. And then something happens and then we stand there holding on to words like 'if'."
"She regretted the explanation immediately, but that was because she always regretted everything."
Explore more quotes by Ta-Nehisi Coates
"You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact."
"You may not be able to change the course of government, but you can achieve some peace. And books were the path to that. I grew up in a house where books were everywhere."
"The last slaveholder has been dead for a very long time. The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer. To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism A la carte."
"You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable."
"I have not spent my time studying the problem of 'race'-'race' itself is just a restatement and retrenchment of the problem. You see this from time to time when some dullard-usually believing himself white-proposes that the way forward is a grand orgy of black and white, ending only when we are all beige and thus the same 'race.' But a great number of 'black' people already are beige. And the history of civilization is littered with dead 'races' (Frankish, Italian, German, Irish) later abandoned because they no longer serve their purpose-the organization of people beneath, and beyond, the umbrella of rights."
"My mother and father were always pushing me away from secondhand answers-even the answers they themselves believed. I don't know that I have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. But every time I ask it, the question is refined. That is the best of what the old heads meant when they spoke of being 'politically conscious-as much a series of actions as a state of being, a constant questioning, questioning as ritual, questioning as exploration rather than the search for certainty."
"Dad had turned conservative, but not in the way of the demonologists who sold us out for tenure and crumbs. More like a man who spurns the false talk of revolution for the humbler mission of resurrecting one soul at a time."
"Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains-whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains."
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