top of page
.png){kind=small}
"Very few Americans will directly proclaim that they are in favor of black people being left to the streets. But a very large number of Americans will do all they can to preserve the Dream. The point of this language of 'intention and 'personal responsibility is broad exoneration. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried out best. 'Good intention is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Isolation quotes
"Adam says I isolate. He is addicted to telling me that I spend too much time in my head. It's an unhealthy behavior. Look, I don't see how not bothering other people with your screwed-up vision of the world constitutes unhealthy behavior."
"When I was going on one day in the car about not having any close friends - using my favourite metaphor: the cage of glass between me and the rest of the world - she just laughed. 'You like it,' she said. 'You say you're isolated, boyo, but you really think you're different."
"I cannot hate them because nothing binds me to them, I have nothing in common with them."
"At the top of the slope on the perimeter of the site, overlooking six lanes of motorway, is a diner frequented by lorry drivers who have either just unloaded or or are waiting to pick up their cargo. Anyone nursing a disappointment with domestic life would find relief in this tiled, brightly lit cafeteria with its smells of fries and petrol, for it has the reassuring feel of a place where everyone is just passing through--and which therefore has none of the close-knit or convivial atmosphere which could cast a humiliating light on one's own alienation. It suggests itself as an ideal location for Christmas lunch for those let down by their families."
"Occasionally a car swooshed by in the rain and its headlights would swing round momentarily and illuminate the room-the pool table, snowshoes on the wall and the rowing machine, the armchair in which Henry sat, motionless, a glass in his hand and the cigarette burning low between his fingers. For a moment his face, pale and watchful as a ghost's, would be caught in the headlights and then, very gradually, it would slide back into the dark."
"There is only one solitude, and it is great and is not easy to bear, and to almost everyone there come hours when they would gladly exchange it for some kind of communion, however banal and cheap, for the appearance of some slight harmony with the most easily available, with the most undeserving. But perhaps those are just the hours when solitude grows; for its growing is painful like the growing of boys and sad like the beginning of Spring."
"Each night the black sky and the bright stars were my stunning companions; occasionally I'd see their beauty and solemnity so plainly that I'd realize in a piercing way that my mother was right. That someday I would be grateful and that in fact I was grateful now, that I felt something growing in me that was strong and real."
"Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamn lonely anymore."
Explore more quotes by Ta-Nehisi Coates
"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."
"In those years, hip-hop saved my life. I was still half alien to the people around me. I loved them, mostly because I'd realized that there was no other choice. Hip-hop gave me a common language, but that August, on liberated land, I found that there were other ways of speaking, a mother tongue that, no matter age, no matter interest, lived in us all."
"By the time I visited those battlefields, I knew that they had been retrofitted as the staging ground for a great deception, and this was my only security, because they could no longer insult me by lying to me. I knew-and the most important thing I knew was that, somewhere deep with them, they knew too. I like to think that knowing might have kept me from endangering you, that having understood and acknowledged the anger, I could control it. I like to think that it could have allowed me to speak the needed words to the woman and then walk away. I like to think this, but I can't promise it. The struggle is really all I have for you because it is the only portion of this world under your control."
"Our teachers urged us toward the example of freedom marchers, Freedom Riders, and Freedom Summers, and it seemed that the month could not pass without a series of films dedicated to the glories of being beaten on camera. The black people in these films seemed to love the worst things in life - love the dogs that rent their children apart, the tear gas that clawed at their lungs, the firehorses that tore off their clothes and tumbled them into the streets. They seemed to love the men who raped them, the women who cursed them, love the children who spat on them, the terrorists that bombed them. Why are they showing this to us? Why were only our heroes nonviolent? I speak not of the morality of nonviolence, but of the sense that blacks are in especial need of this morality."
"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."
"When I see Bruce Banner becoming the Hulk, it's only a picture. My imagination has to do some of the work there, to impute feeling and everything. We're talking about something that's so surreal, it's just not possible within the world as we know it. So that requires a form that is not so literal."
"I have no God to hold me up. And I believe that when they shatter the body they shatter everything, and I knew that all of us-Christians, Muslims, atheists-lived in this fear of this truth."
"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."
"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."
"No matter was the professional talkers tell you, I never met a black boy who wanted to fail."
bottom of page