Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
I devoured the books because they were the rays of light peeking out from the doorframe, and perhaps past that door there was another world, one beyond the gripping fear that undergirded the Dream.
Ta-Nehisi Coates • Between the World and Me
“our politics…are shaped largely by writing and the stories we tell.” - Ta-Nehisi Coates
(CBS Mornings interview, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgWt-QcPYMo)
I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery, against the country whose armies fanned out across the world to extend their dominion. The world, the real one, was civilization secured and ruled by savage means.
Ta-Nehisi Coates • Between the World and Me
Through all people’s history, there have been those who rule over others. Can humanity progress without exploitation?
(John Stewart in conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates)
She spoke like an American, with the same expectations of fairness, even fairness belated and begrudged, that she took into medical school all those years ago. And she spoke like a black woman, with all the pain that undercuts those exact feelings.
Ta-Nehisi Coates • Between the World and Me
ago—the craft of writing as the art of thinking.
Ta-Nehisi Coates • Between the World and Me
What has been surprising—pleasantly so—is that there really is no translation needed, that going deeper actually reveals the human. Get to the general through the specific, as the rule goes. Still, even as I have come to understand this, it feels abstract to me.
Ta-Nehisi Coates • The Message
But it was one thing to allow someone to kill for you and another to let him live next door.