Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
What it is is that Barack Obama was raised by a white mother and two white grandparents who, A, told him he was black and that there was nothing wrong with being black.
Quotes to Explore
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Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.
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I have a rebellious teenage thing. If my mom says I can't do it, I'm gonna do it. But I'm pretty good. That's why it was fun to play Sam in 'The Bling Ring.' I got to be someone crazy and wild to the extreme, then go home and relax and get rid of the burden.
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I know there is something out there, and like most people, I tend to believe in it more when things go bad. But I'm not like Shirley MacLaine, who probably believes we were past lovers in another life.
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Self esteem is the reputation we acquire with ourselves.
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Now, I am completely independent - I earn my living by speaking and writing.
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It was a small provincial place with great people and I had a happy childhood growing up in Queens.
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The test is to recognize the mistake, admit it and correct it. To have tried to do something and failed is vastly better than to have tried to do nothing and succeeded.
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I have a fascination with Flight 93. My emotions are mixed: awe, gratitude, fear, heartache, pride - even, in some ways, guilt.
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Corporations cannot commit treason, or be outlawed or excommunicated, for they have no souls.
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Sometimes I see through things when people are talking. I'm really sensitive to other people, so I can tell if somebody's putting on a front.
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Sometimes, poor people don't smell too good, so love can have no nose.
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When you sample something, you're using the crutch of borrowing chords and melodies from a song that's already great, that's already stood the test of time, that's already special. When you're trying to do it all from scratch, you're writing something brand new that has to stand on its own.
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Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver.
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I'm really just a normal person.
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I always wake up 10 minutes before I have to be anywhere.
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Before this distinguished assembly and the world, the bells today proclaim the joyous tidings of the completion of this quietly soaring tower.
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Real people - the interesting ones, anyway - don't remain static, and neither do the ones I write about. Changes take place, and they react to them.
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You cannot say we are a healthy, dynamic democracy when one party wins almost two-thirds of the vote.
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While I am impulsive in many areas of my life, marriage is not one of them.
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I came to Venice for the first time in 1968 and was lucky enough to make the acquaintanceship, and then the friendship, of two Venetians, Roberta and Franco, who remain my best friends here after almost 50 years.
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The reader may ask himself if this is not cruelty and injustice of a kind so terrible that it beggars the imagination, and whether these poor people would not fare far better if they were entrusted to the devils in Hell than they do at the hands of the devils of the New World who masquerade as Christians.
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I value mothers and motherhood enormously. For every inattentive or abusive mother in my fiction I think you'll find a dozen or so who are neither.
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I've thought about doing other dramatic roles besides westerns, but I grew up in the West and I know the West.
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What it is is that Barack Obama was raised by a white mother and two white grandparents who, A, told him he was black and that there was nothing wrong with being black.
