Between The World And Me Coates Quotes & Sayings

I'm so thankful for the Internet because actors and singers and performers now have a way to connect with their fans on a very personal level which I think is quite special. — Ariana Grande

I should never have left you. I was caught between fealty to my world and fealty to my blood. I chose wrong. I was a king. I held the knife. I acted as a king should. But I did not act as family should. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

The facts of my native world, I came to understand that my country was a galaxy, and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium of West Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of Mr. Belvedere. I obsessed over the distance between that other sector of space and my own. I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me. And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

The black world was expanding before me, and I could see now that that world was more than a photonegative of that of the people who believe they are white. "White America" is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, "white people" would cease to exist for want of reasons. There will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been "black," and this points to the great difference between their world and ours. We — Ta-Nehisi Coates

And one morning while in the woods I stumbled suddenly upon the thing, Stumbled upon it in a grassy clearing guarded by scaly oaks and elms And the sooty details of the scene rose, thrusting themselves between the world and me ... . — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I'm a bit of lunatic with shoes and jackets and jeans. It's just how I am. — Graham Coxon

The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Korean films have always been distributed to international audiences as arthouse films. — Kim Ji-woon

Yesterday you were thinking about today because then it was tomorrow; now it is today and you are thinking about tomorrow, and when the tomorrow comes, it will become today- because anything that exists, exists here and now, it cannot exist otherwise. — Rajneesh

[O]ur greatest contributions to the cause of freedom and development overseas is not what we do over there, but what we do right here at home. — Frances Moore Lappe

We should be supportive of the president and supportive of rights of all in a pluralistic democracy that we're called to love. And we live our faith; we don't legislate our faith. — Otis Moss III

So I think, if September 11 taught us anything, it taught us that we're vulnerable, and vulnerable in ways that we didn't fully understand. — Condoleezza Rice

Best to introduce yourself to patience now, so that it might find you when you call upon it later. — Tahereh Mafi

I have spent much of my studies searching for the right question by which I might fully understand the breach between the world and me. 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 are already 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, and the umbrella of rights. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

There will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been "black," and this points to the great difference between their world and ours. We did not choose our fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible. They are the ones who came up with a one-drop rule that separated the "white" from the "black," even if it meant that their own blue-eyed sons would live under the lash. The result is a people, black people, who embody all physical varieties and whose life stories mirror this physical range. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Well, you can't make old friends. — Zadie Smith

The lucky ones died in the blasts. They were spared the fate of starvation, cannibalism, rape and slaughter. Where a man could be killed over half-eaten can of corn. — Joe Reyes

We know how we will die - with cousins in double murder suicides, in wars that are mere theory to you, convalescing in hospitals, slowly choked out by angina and cholesterol. We are the walking lowest rung, and all that stands between us and beast, between us and the local zoo, is respect, the respect you take as natural as sugar and shit. We know what we are, that we walk like we are not long for this world, that this world has never longed for us. I — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Whenever I prepare for a journey I prepare as though for death. Should I never return, all is in order. — Katherine Mansfield

I think kids have got to learn how to work with what's happening, work with social, work with everything. To complain about how things aren't the way they used to be ... — Diplo

One of the things that's really, really present in 'Between the World and Me' is, I am in some ways outside of the African-American tradition. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I was a capable boy, intelligent, well-liked, but powerfully afraid. And I felt, vaguely, wordlessly, that for a child to be marked off for such a life, to be forced to live in fear was a great injustice. And what was the source of this fear? What was hiding behind the smoke screen of streets and schools? And what did it mean that number 2 pencils, conjugations without context, Pythagorean theorems, handshakes, and head nods were the difference between life and death, were the curtains drawing down between the world and me? — Ta-Nehisi Coates