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"Barack Obama's victories in 2008 and 2012 were dismissed by some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans. But there is nothing 'mere about symbols."
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"It was all extremely symbolic; but then, if you choose to think so, nothing in this world is not symbolical."
"A rose trapped inside a fist."
"Look, moonI turned silver for you."
"However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for."
"Only the foolish, blinded by language's conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it's melancholy rim, green in it's envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it's greatest rages, black."
"A sausage is an image of rest, peace and tranquility in stark contrast to the destruction and chaos of everyday life."
Explore more quotes by Ta-Nehisi Coates
"To question what I see, then to question what I see after that, because the questions matter as much, perhaps more than, the answers."
"I had thought that I must mirror the outside world, create a carbon copy of white claims to civilization. It was beginning to occur to me to question the logic of the claim itself... I was was only beginning to learn to be wary of my own humanity, of my own hurt and anger - I didn't yet realize that the boot on your neck is just as likely to make you delusional as it is to ennoble."
"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."
"Mostly they all were products of single parents, and in the most tragic category - black boys, with no particular criminal inclinations but whose very lack of direction put them in the crosshairs of the world."
"My belief is in the chaos of the world and that you have to find your peace within the chaos and that you still have to find some sort of mission."
"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."
"You and I, my son, are that 'below.' That was true in 1776. It is true today. There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream."
"It is truly horrible to understand yourself as the essential below of your country. It breaks too much of what we would like to think about ourselves, our lives, the world we move through and the people who surround us. The struggle to understand is our only advantage over this madness."
"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."
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