Robert > Robert's Quotes

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming “the people” has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible—this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“my death would not be the fault of any human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of “race,” imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgment of invisible gods.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“This need to be always on guard was an unmeasured expenditure of energy, the slow siphoning of the essence.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“All my life I’d heard people tell their black boys and black girls to “be twice as good,” which is to say “accept half as much.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“She compared America to Rome. She said she thought the glory days of this country had long ago passed, and even those glory days were sullied: They had been built on the bodies of others. “And we can’t get the message,” she said. “We don’t understand that we are embracing our deaths.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“I spent years developing a career, acquiring assets, engaging responsibilities. And one racist act. It’s all it takes.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me