Angie Thomas Quotes
When I was in the YA age range myself, I didn't feel like there were a lot of books for me.
Quotes to Explore
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I think the more we see more officers holding each other accountable, the more we will see people trust cops in this country.
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At the time when I was in college, Oscar Grant had just lost his life in Oakland, Calif. He was an unarmed young black male who had a record. And at the time when his death was making headlines, more people were talking about what he had done in his past than the fact that he unjustly lost his life.
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My maternal grandmother was a star on her high school basketball team in small-town Mississippi.
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We see organizations that target young black men to give them direction in life, but so often, black girls are missed. I wanted to represent them.
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We're seeing young people find their own voices and find their activism.
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I've always been a huge Tupac fan, and I often listen to him for inspiration or when I'm stuck.
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I think that the more of us who take the time to understand how someone else is feeling, the more likely we are to resist alongside them.
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Literature plays a huge role in examining difficult real-life issues.
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Trayvon Martin was 17, Mike Brown was young, Tamir Rice was 12. And so young people are affected by it, possibly the most affected, because they're seeing themselves.
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I really do hope 'The Hate U Give' provides mirrors for readers who don't often get them in books. I've had so many young black girls tell me just how thrilled they are to see someone who looks like them on the cover. I hope that they see themselves in the pages as well.
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Initially, I wanted to write middle grade. YA scared me: there's a lot of responsibility in being a YA author. It's so important to give that age range the right books that reflect their world and show them themselves.
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I wanted to write a book like a rapper would write it - I didn't want to hold back. Rappers catch a lot of slack; I'm not going to be cursing up a storm, but when I look at Nas... his first album is one of my favorites. I want to tell stories like that.
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The Hogwarts houses are really gangs. They have their own colours, their own hideouts, and they are always riding for each other, like gangs.
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I wrote 'The Hate U Give' as a short story while I was in college at a mostly white school in conservative Mississippi.
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I look at books as being a form of activism. Sometimes they'll show us a side of the world that we might not have known about.
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A lot of people involved in the Black Lives Matter movement are actually sticking up for those other lives. They are turning out for their Muslim brothers and sisters who are now being targeted.
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I want you to realize your voice matters.
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A lot of people are quick to say that saying 'black lives matter' makes you anti-cop. All lives should indeed matter, but we have a systemic problem in this country in which black lives do not matter enough.
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I think, as a writer, sometimes you do worry, 'Am I just writing, or am I putting the burden of African-Americans on my shoulder and carrying it?' But if we just write the stories that we're supposed to write, that's when we have the biggest impact.
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From my anger, frustration, and hurt, I wrote the short story that would later become 'The Hate U Give.'
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I often say that I want to write like Tupac rapped. I could listen to his album, and within a few minutes, I could go from thinking deeply to laughing to crying to partying.
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YA does a fantastic job of being socially aware and, at the same time, entertaining.
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Michael Brown - when he lost his life, there was more focus on what he had done sometimes than what was done to him.
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When I was in the YA age range myself, I didn't feel like there were a lot of books for me.