Tanahashi Coates Quotes

A painting works only on the edge of not working. Then what is ungraspable comes near. ~ Kazuaki Tanahashi

If you are under control, you lose the danger of glimpsing an unknown realm. ~ Kazuaki Tanahashi

What pleases our mind is not dangerous enough. ~ Kazuaki Tanahashi

The enso contains the perfect and imperfect; that is why it is always complete. ~ Kazuaki Tanahashi

If you learn to enjoy waiting, you don't have to wait to enjoy. ~ Kazuaki Tanahashi

We usually evaluate creative process in terms of how much feeling or thinking was behind the work or how well the work was done. Isn't there any other way of appreciating the process? What if the standard of excellence was how fully present the artist was during the process? ~ Kazuaki Tanahashi

C'mon. We can turn it into a fun game - What's Scarier, The Basement Or The Attic? ~ Darcy Coates

Ginger is now called Jack, and utterly adored in a home of his very own. Blending ~ Margrit Coates

I don't so much hope that any reader "agrees" with me, as I hope to haunt them, to trouble their sense of how things actually are. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I have so rarely been afforded the right of farewell, ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

He had all the pleasure of going to be happy. ~ Robert M. Coates

Believed merely a week earlier, ideas I had taken from one ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Among the Conscious, a man is only worth his latest reading. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

My impulses were not filled with unfailing virtue. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Focusing on a person's positive attributes is an incredible way to give love. ~ Denise Coates

Thinking, one could say, is something we do only when we are no good at an activity. ~ John Coates

sometimes fail to walk the air ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

How much of ignorance is willful? ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

You may rule the world by day, but the creatures of the night demand their privacy. ~ Darcy Coates

What level of personal are we talking about?" she mumbled. "I don't mind discussing my periods in graphic detail, but I'm probably going to stay quiet about the jar of fingernail clippings I carry with me at all times. ~ Darcy Coates

The universe was playing with loaded dice, which insured an excess of cowards in our ranks. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Future is Owned By The One That Can Educate Someone Quicker, Faster and Easier than the Competition! ~ Jeremy Coates

traveling as a pointless luxury, like blowing the rent check on a pink suit. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

But what did it mean to find me, a slave, dreaming about those books? ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

...should the Dreamers reap what they had sown, we would reap it right with them. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Had any people, anywhere, ever been as sprawling and beautiful as us? ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Good intention" is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream. An ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

You have the right to every end of your exploration and no motherfucker anywhere can tell you otherwise ... ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Our world is physical. Learn to play defense - ignore the head and keep your eyes on the body. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

An equality that requires blacks to be twice as good is not equality - it's a double standard. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I had not been prepared for the simple charm of watching someone you love grow. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I knew about wild plums twice before I tasted any. ~ Grace Stone Coates

Race is the child of racism, not the father. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

What the hell's wrong with this house?" I asked it. "Locked rooms, and now rooms without doors at all?" I made to turn ~ Darcy Coates

racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

It's like summer wear the world out, and by October everyone is just ready for a nap ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I learned this living among a people whom I would never have chosen, because the privileges of being black are not always self-evident. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Then she looked at her phone and saw, to her horror, she hadn't been hung up on after all. Her battery had died. ~ Darcy Coates

The loudest of doomsayers, so often, carry the weightiest of sin. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

To yell "black-on-black crime" is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Dad called it "enlightenment" but to me, it just felt lonely. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

This need to be always on guard was an unmeasured expenditure of energy, the slow siphoning of the essence. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

The entire narrative of this country argues against the truth of who you are. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

...would rather live white than live free. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I found that the same softness which once made me a target now compelled people to trust me with their stories. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery, ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

What did I know of loving anything, beyond a longing, beyond being biased in one woman's direction. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

That he was outnumbered did not matter because the whole world had outnumbered him long ago, and what do numbers matter? ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

No matter was the professional talkers tell you, I never met a black boy who wanted to fail. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Where others saw America in lovely columns, marvels of engineering, and refined democrats, Dad saw only masks concealing the heralds of woe. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

The rhyme pad was a spell book - it summoned asphalt elementals, elder gods, and weeping ancestors, all of whom had your back. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Seven years after I saw the pictures of those doors, I received my first adult passport. I wish I had come to it sooner. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

It's not prettier or better than other places and it sure a shell isn't an easy place, but I know how to live here. And that counts. ~ Deborah Coates

Daddy, are we democraps or repelicans? Lainie daintily placed her fork down and gave her brother a stern look. "We're Texans silly. ~ Kellie Coates Gilbert

Racism - the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them - inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Kids in North Lawndale need not be confused about their prospects: Cook County's Juvenile Temporary Detention Center sits directly adjacent to the neighborhood. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

But a great number of educators spoke of "personal responsibility" in a country authored and sustained by a criminal irresponsibility. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

What I want you to know is that this is not your fault, even if it is ultimately your responsibility. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

There are no racists in America, or at least none that the people who need to be white know personally. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

...I had adjusted to it by then. And that, alone, is the worst of it: that a man could feel his violation as natural." - Hiram Walker ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I love, and the world is mine! ~ Florence Earle Coates

I am convinced that the Dreamers, at least the Dreamers of today, would rather live white than live free. In ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I take acting lessons with my coach, and what do I get famous for? Holding a puppy! ~ Kim Coates

People know things and have a remarkable capacity to act in their individual immediate interests all the time. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Why - for us and only us - is the other side of free will and free spirits an assault on our bodies? ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Build it and they shall come, write it and they shall read .(me), but not the first bit though. ~ Karl Coates

But we were supposed to be exceptional." "Wakanda is exceptional, Baba. And now, more than ever, we need someone to remind us. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I think a lot about the private emotions of black people - what we feel and yet is rarely publicly expressed. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

These were the days when I powerfully believed Breyers and Entenmann's to be pioneers in the field of antidepressants. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

The pursuit of knowledge was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Outside of hip-hop, it was in comics that I most often found the aesthetics and wisdom of my world reflected. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Everybody thinks that an important book has to be a big, long book. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I'm not going to break up my family, not for a book. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

We'd summoned you out of ourselves, and you were not given a vote. If only for that reason, you deserved all the protection we could muster. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Some of the other students were out on the grass in front of Alain Locke Hall, in pink and green, chanting, singing, stomping, clapping, stepping. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,' wrote Wiley. 'Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant "government of the people" but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term "people" to actually mean. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I think, as a writer, I'm in my own head. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

You still believe the injustice was Michael Brown. You have not yet grappled with your own myths and narratives and discovered the plunder everywhere around us. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Bored whites are brutal whites. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

But I was grounded and domesticated by the plain fact that should I now go down, I would not go down alone. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

America understands itself as God's handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

It is insufficient to state the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body - it is heritage. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body. That ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I could have
you arrested!" Which is to
say: "I could take your
body. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

the sprawl, is the automobile, the noose ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

At conferences, black boys were assembled. At schools we were herded into auditoriums. At home, mothers summoned us to dinner tables, and there they delivered the news: Our time was short. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

My work is to give you what I know of my own particular path while allowing you to walk your own. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Lainie, of course, would never turn gray. No respectable woman from Texas ever would."
~ A Woman of Fortune ~ Kellie Coates Gilbert

I was about 13 or 14 when I heard Malcolm X's speech 'Message to the Grass Roots.' ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Perhaps being named "black" was just someone's name for being at the bottom, a human turned to object, object turned to pariah. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates