Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
Somebody once told me, black people, in and of themselves, are cosmopolitan. There's cosmopolitanism within the black experience. There's an incredible amount.
Quotes to Explore
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People should be able to express their culture without getting into all that chauvinistic thing.
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When people say hello to me, I feel like maybe I know them from somewhere, because they say, like, 'Hi! How are you?' And I'm like, 'Oh, hi!' And then I realize, 'Oh, no, they just think they know me because they watched me in a movie.' Which is cool, but definitely not a normal thing.
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Every story I write adds to me a little, changes me a little, forces me to reexamine an attitude or belief, causes me to research and learn, helps me to understand people and grow.
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What I find so interesting about people is the choices they make, and how that effects their behavior, their sense of self and their relationships.
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For fiction, I'm not particularly nationalistic. I'm not like the Hugo Chavez of Latin American letters, you know? I want people to read good work.
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What people love about Santorum is he is who is he. He speaks his words. He loves God. He loves his country, and he loves gays.
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Well, the first thing that clued me in to the fact that there was something really scary about breast cancer, way beyond the thought of dying, was coming across an ad in the newspaper for pink breast cancer teddy bears. I am not that afraid of dying, but I am terrified of dying with a pink teddy bear under my arm.
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Wasting time is something that people do or feel all over the world, not just in Italy.
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The biggest influence? I've had several at different times – but the biggest for me was Bob Dylan, who was a guy that came along when I was twelve or thirteen and just changed all the rules about what it meant to write songs.
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It seems every year, people make the resolution to exercise and lose weight and get in shape.
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I don't want to worry about maintaining an air of decorum that's not natural to me.
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I simply seem to drift. But I sort of allow the drift, because it has a kind of check – it forces me to work harder at what I'm interested in.
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The Japanese people are usually very prudent, even when they are convinced change is necessary.
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When I started training to fight, it was more out of boredom than anything. I was looking for more things to do. I started with boxing, and my coaches told me I had a lot of potential and that I should consider making it a career. I was like, 'Whatever.' I was just 15 at the time, and I never imagined something like that.
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You should be appeasing people as much as possible, not stigmatising them. The ban of the burkini puts into question people's individual freedoms.
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A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and adolescence were something I knew.
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I need about three seats lengthwise to sleep on a plane. It's not easy for me to curl up.
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What happens to the Microsofts, Oracles and IBMs of the world is that when they get big enough, they don't think they need to bring that same level of focus and energy to the end-user experience.
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I'm not driven to get back into politics. It's not on my top five things to do before I die, but saying that, I may be in politics in the next year or the next ten years. I've been on the front line for 12 years, four in state government, eight on the national level.
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What is the good of experience if you do not reflect?
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What basketball expresses is what jazz expresses. Certain cultural predispositions to make art. All African-American art has a substratum, or baseline, of improvisation and spontaneity. You find that in both basketball and jazz.
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There have been interviews with people saying they are jealous of Kangana. There are so many people who are jealous of my success.
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Most famous people get younger and younger. I sometimes ask myself that question: 'How come I'm the only person who's getting older?'
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Somebody once told me, black people, in and of themselves, are cosmopolitan. There's cosmopolitanism within the black experience. There's an incredible amount.
