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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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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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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Without understanding yourself, what is the use of trying to understand the world?
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I just want to try writing for other people 'cause it's quite exciting.
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Nobody in my family was musical. I had no idea you could be a songwriter and make a living at it. It was all discovery. It was all just thrown at me.
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It's all about sound. It's that simple.
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You cannot tailor-make the situations in life but you can tailor-make the attitudes to fit those situations.
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To me an unnecessary action, or shot, or casualty, was not only waste but sin.
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I fear theology is--in the words attributed to William Temple--"still in its infancy" when it comes to animals.
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Black politics is redemption and transformation. It's not always pretty, but it's not always ugly either. I'll put India.Arie up against Donald Trump any day and let the people choose.
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The simple point is that literature belongs to the world man constructs, not to the world he sees; to his home, not his environment.
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I have been overwhelmed by the response to 'The Queen of Zombie Hearts.'
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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.
