Ta-Nehisi Coates said this quote

“ Even then, I was dreaming of Raistlin's black robes one moment, and Dorsett's spin move the next. This was what my father deeded--that our Knowledge of Self be more than America, that we understand the brain death that sprawled from the projects to the subdivisions. Consciousness was a beginning, but the imagination could turn straight 18s into paladins in plate, could make warrens in tunnels from graph paper, could pull armies of gnolls from miniatures--that was the Knowledge that ultimately would find a way out. ”

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I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

It is truly horrible to understand yourself as the essential below of your country. It breaks too much of what we would like to think about ourselves, our lives, the world we move through and the people who surround us. The struggle to understand is our only advantage over this madness.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I wanted to pursue things, to know things, but I could not match the means of knowing that came naturally to me with the expectations of professors. The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made fore the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free. Slowly, I was discovering myself.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

It began to strike me that the point of my education was a kind of discomfort, was the process that would not award me my own especial Dream but would break all the dreams, all the comforting myths of Africa, of America, and everywhere, and would leave me only with humanity in all its terribleness. And there was so much terrible out there, even among us. You must understand this.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates