Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
I think Barack Obama was born into a home not just to a white woman and white grandparents, but a white woman and white grandparents who shockingly told him it was okay that he was black and that he should not be ashamed of it and that he should, in fact, be proud of it.
Quotes to Explore
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Any art worthy of its name should address 'life', 'man', 'nature', 'death' and 'tragedy'.
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Some borrowers are pretty damn good at fraud.
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I was certainly a better actor after my five years in Hollywood. I had learned to be natural - never to exaggerate. I found I could act on the stage in just the same way as I had acted in a studio: using my ordinary voice, eliminating gestures, keeping everything extremely simple.
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The marketability, the success of a book, ultimately rests with whether or not people will find the concept/characters/title/cover appealing.
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I became interested in ocean issues in the 1980s when I couldn't take my daughters swimming because of pollution at our local beach. Twenty-five years later, I'm a board member of Oceana, the world's largest international organization dedicated to ocean conservation.
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I need to meet people to be able to write.
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I was a child of a tech family. My grandfather was a nuclear physicist and was always a gadget guy.
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Jim Thompson understood something about the serial killer before the psychology caught up to it, which is that they are detached to it and they do want to get caught.
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The entire value of a person is subjective to your relationship with them.
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I learn something not because I have to, but because I really want to. That's the same view I have for performing. I'm performing because I really want to, not because I have to bring bread back home.
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Mind is everything. Muscle - pieces of rubber. All that I am, I am because of my mind.
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Right now I'm so old that if I had a big gush of money, I don't know what I'd do with it. I don't travel anymore. I don't need anything, don't want anything. I'd give it to my son, I guess, and let him enjoy it.
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You have two alternatives. One: you can put your life on hold and wait for the phone to ring. Two: you run ahead as if your life depended on it.
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I taught a lot of art history, especially Chinese, Japanese, and Indian. But the painting classes came back. The nudes came back. Not so much the still lifes. So now our department is the worst department, partly because it has the worst facilities.
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Living in the lap of luxury isn't bad except that you never know when luxury is going to stand up.
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No one is above the law, not even the president. I believe perjury does meet at least the definition of high misdemeanor.
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At age three, if you have a still-growing brain, it's a human behavior. In chimps, by age three, the brain is formed over 90 percent. That's why they can cope with their environment very easily after birth - faster than us, anyway. But in humans, we continue to grow our brains. That's why we need care from our parents.
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My parents taught me everything and set me up for life. I owe to them all the things I'm passionate about: music, art, the people I love, my career and family life, the fact that I have children and the way that I raise them.
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Without understanding yourself, what is the use of trying to understand the world?
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From my childhood, I am like this. I never go parties and attend functions.
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If the Lord sets you to guard a lonely post in perfect stillness from all active work, you ought to be just as content as to be in the midst of the active warfare. It is no virtue to love the Master's work better than the Master's will.
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You can almost read any emotion through someone's eyes.
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I'm not somebody who plans. There were times I planned a lot in my life, and it never turns out how you plan it. So I think it's important not to. I'm a very spontaneous person.
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I think Barack Obama was born into a home not just to a white woman and white grandparents, but a white woman and white grandparents who shockingly told him it was okay that he was black and that he should not be ashamed of it and that he should, in fact, be proud of it.
