to live in the disquiet

all quotes from between the world and me by ta-nehisi coates

"my mother and father were always pushing me away from secondhand answers - even the answers they themselves believed. i don't know that i have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. but every time i ask it, the question is refined. that is the best of what the old heads meant when they spoke of being 'politically conscious' - as much a series of actions as a state of being, a constant questioning, questioning as ritual, questioning as exploration rather than the search for certainty."

"you preserved your life because your life, your body, was as good as anyone's, because your blood was as precious as jewels, and it should never be sold for magic, for spirituals inspired by the unknowable hereafter. you do not give your precious body to the billy clubs of birmingham sheriffs nor to the insidious gravity of the streets."

"'white america' is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). but however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, 'white people' would cease to exist for want of reasons."

"your grandparents... were rebelling against the history books that spoke of black people only as sentimental 'firsts' - first black five-star general, first black congressman, first black mayor - always presented in the bemused manner of a category of trivial pursuit."

"i did not find a coherent tradition marching lockstep but instead factions, and factions within factions. . . things i believed merely a week earlier, ideas i had taken from one book, could be smashed to splinters by another. . . by my second year, it was natural for me to spend a typical day mediating between frederick douglass's interrogration into america and martin delany's escape into nationalism. perhaps they were somehow both right. i had come looking for a parade, for a military review of champions marching in ranks. instead i was left with a brawl of ancestors, a herd of dissenters, sometimes marching together but just as often marching away from each other. . . 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 only beginning to learn to be wary of my own humanity, of my own hurt and anger - i didn't yet realize that the boot on your neck is just as likely to make you delusional as it is to ennoble."

"i was learning the craft of poetry, which really was an intensive version of what my mother had taught me all those years ago - the craft of writing as the art of thinking. poetry aims for an economy of truth - loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts. poetry was not simply the transcription of notions - beautiful writing rarely is. i wanted to learn to write, which was ultimately, still, as my mother had taught me, a confrontation with my own innocence, my own rationalizations. poetry was the processing of my thoughts until the slag of justifications fell away and i was left with the cold steel truths of life."

"i began to see discord, argument, chaos, perhaps even fear, as i kind of power. i was learning to live in the disquiet i felt in moorland-springarn, in the mess of my mind. the gnawing discomfort, the chaos, the intellectual vertigo was not an alarm, it was a beacon. it began to strike me that the point of my education was a kind of discomfort. . ."

"this heap of realizations was a weight. i found them physically painful and exhausting. true, i was coming to enjoy the dizziness, the vertigo that must come with any odyssey. but in those early moments, the unceasing contradictions sent me into a gloom. there was nothing holy or particular in my skin; i was black because of history and heritage. there was no nobility in falling, in being bound, in living oppressed, and there was no inherent meaning in black blood. black blood wasn't black; black skin wasn't even black."

"i grew up in a house drawn between love and fear. there was no room for softness. but this girl with the long dreads revealed something else - that love could be soft and understanding; that, soft or hard, love was an act of heroism."

"the same softness that once made me a target now compelled people to trust me with their stories."