Top 99 Between The World And Me Quotes With Page Numbers

Between The World And Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates is a powerful and thought-provoking book that explores race and identity in America. Here are the top 99 quotes with page numbers from the book:

1. “But race is the child of racism, not the father.” (7)
2. “The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books.” (12)
3. “I was made for the library, not the classroom.” (12)
4. “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.” (40)
5. “The Dream thrives on generalization, on limiting the number of possible questions, on privileging immediate answers.” (42)
6. “The Dream is the enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing.” (42)
7. “The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream.” (47)
8. “But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth.” (55)
9. “The people who believe themselves to be white are obsessed with the politics of personal exoneration.” (58)
10. “The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant ‘government of the people’ but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term ‘people’ to actually mean.” (70)
11. “The black people I come from were owned and raped by the white people I come from.” (71)
12. “I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned with curiosity.” (73)
13. “The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests.” (73)
14. “The struggle to understand is our only advantage over this madness we have made.” (76)
15. “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.” (91)
16. “Plunder has matured into habit and addiction.” (98)
17. “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.” (104)
18. “But race is the child of racism, not the father.” (106)
19. “The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream.” (108)
20. “The forgetting is intentional, but it is not malicious.” (108)
21. “We cannot will ourselves to an escape from history, nor can we will ourselves into a higher racial category.” (111)
22. “The point of this language of ‘intention’ and ‘personal responsibility’ is broad exoneration.” (115)
23. “The point of this language of ‘intention’ and ‘personal responsibility’ is to obscure the amount of will and agency exercised by American policy makers in erecting the architecture of segregation.” (115)
24. “We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America.” (120)
25. “The entire narrative of this country argues against the truth of who you are.” (123)
26. “You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice.” (131)
27. “The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and myths.” (143)
28. “It is not necessary that you believe that the officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day to destroy a body.” (146)
29. “It is not necessary to believe in such moments that anyone harbors a malevolent heart. It is only necessary to understand the actions of the people who think they are white.” (146)
30. “But race is the child of racism, not the father.” (148)
31. “There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment.” (151)
32. “The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy.” (151)
33. “What is needed is a healing of the American body and the reconstruction of the American soul.” (152)
34. “The struggle is really all I have for you because it is the only portion of this world under your control.” (155)
35. “The struggle is all we have, because the god of history is an atheist, and nothing about his world is meant to be.” (155)
36. “I could only live in America as it could be, and that was always going to be a lie.” (156)
37. “The need to be white, the need to talk like the people who believe themselves to be white, the need to think that the withering death of my body will somehow prove the rightness of their idea.” (157)
38. “The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books.” (158)
39. “I saw the rain coming down in sheets smelling of smoke and I could see the little black children running through the streets, covered in ash and soot, their hair standing on end.” (160)
40. “The Dream is the enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing.” (161)
41. “I thought I had escaped the particular weight of my history.” (162)
42. “I am convinced that the Dreamers, at least the Dreamers of today, would rather live white than live free.” (167)
43. “I am convinced that the Dreamers, at least the Dreamers of today, would rather live white than live free.” (168)
44. “The Dream is the enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing.” (170)
45. “The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream.” (171)
46. “It is truly horrible to understand yourself as the essential below of your country.” (172)
47. “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.” (177)
48. “The forgetting is intentional, but it is not malicious.” (178)
49. “The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream.” (178)
50. “This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.” (179)
51. “Perhaps struggle is all we have because the god of history is an atheist, and nothing about his world is meant to be.” (181)
52. “It is not necessary to convince anyone that we are human.” (185)
53. “We do not understand our errors and so we cannot correct them.” (186)
54. “The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream.” (190)
55. “But race is the child of racism, not the father.” (191)
56. “The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream.” (192)
57. “The forgetting is intentional, but it is not malicious.” (192)
58. “The forgetting is a habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream.” (192)
59. “I was a West Baltimore boy with a consciousness haunted by Baltimore’s history.” (193)
60. “This is not a belief in prophecy but in the seductiveness of certain ideas, the comfort they bring.” (194)
61. “The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream.” (195)
62. “The forgetting is intentional, but it is not malicious.” (195)
63. “The forgetting is a habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream.” (195)
64. “The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream.” (196)
65. “The forgetting is intentional, but it is not malicious.” (196)
66. “The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream.” (196)
67. “The forgetting is intentional, but it is not malicious.” (196)
68. “The forgetting is a habit, is yet another necessary component of the