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"I found that the same softness which once made me a target now compelled people to trust me with their stories."
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Exlpore more Sensitivity quotes
"In our age it is not sex that raises its ugly head, but love."
"It seems my heart is made of tissue paper, I wish the world would handle it more delicately."
"I think no more than a week after I started writing I ran into the first block. It's hard to describe it in a way that will be understandable to anyone who is not a neurotic. I will try. All my life I have been haunted by the obsession that to desire a thing or to love a thing intensely is to place yourself in a vulnerable position, to be a possible, if not a probable, loser of what you most want. Let's leave it like that. That block has always been there and always will be, and my chance of getting, or achieving, anything that I long for will always be gravely reduced by the interminable existence of that block."
"I'm not sure. But there's something about the darkness, the stillness of this hour, I think, that creates a language of its own. There's a strange kind of freedom in the dark; a terrifying vulnerability we allow ourselves at exactly the wrong moment, tricked by the darkness into thinking it will keep our secrets. We forget that the blackness is not a blanket; we forget that the sun will soon rise. But in the moment, at least, we feel brave enough to say things we'd never say in the light."
"Turns out rolling your eyes in a bar when 'Land Down Under' plays is like someone belching during the Star Spangled Banner in America."
"Despite the way she rallied, the haunted look in her eyes was enough to break him, as lost and lonely as an abandoned child's."
"I always thought of men as being hard-maybe because I was hard. But there was a softness in Tom that betrayed his large masculine hands and his deep baritone voice. He knew something about love that I didn't. I don't know where he'd learned it, but it wasn't something you got from a book, not something you could learn in an online class, not something you could borrow. Maybe it was something you were born with. Some people knew how to love and some people didn't. Tom was the former. I was the latter. I didn't know which one of us had it worse."
"Vulnerability creates unimaginable space to build each other up, as much as it creates ample room to tear each other down."
"The sensitive artist knows that a bitter wind is blowing."
"I'm afraid i'll lose you if i share all that's real.i'm afraid i'll lose myself if i don't."
Explore more quotes by Ta-Nehisi Coates
"The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter."
"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 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."
"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."
"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."
"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 doesn't actually come from the criminal justice system."
"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."
"Remember your name. Remember that you and I are brothers, are the children of trans-Atlantic rape. Remember the broader consciousness that comes with that. Remember that this consciousness can never ultimately be racial; it must be cosmic."
"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."
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