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In Richard Wright, Dad found a literature of himself. He'd read Manchild in the Promised Land and Another Country, but from Wright he learned that there was an entire shadow canon, a tradition of writers who grabbed the pen, not out of leisure but to break the chain.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates The Beautiful Struggle: A Memoir (2008)

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More quotes by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Something more awful than all our African ancestors is rising with the seas.

Between the World and Me (2015)

The hammer of criminal justice is the preferred tool of a society that has run out of ideas.

The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions.

Between the World and Me (2015)

You actually can’t understand American history without understanding slavery.

Some part of us believes in nonviolence not as an ideal worth striving for, but as a fairy tale passed on to the politically weak.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Ta-Nehisi Coates (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.