Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes

I am a spy in the house of me. I report back from the front lines of the battle that is me. I am somewhat nonplused by the event that is my life.

I was just struggling with my inner vachette and pondering the depths of my own inhumanity.

The bigger confrontation is the one an individual has with itself.

Anybody can get lost in themselves.

When I read profiles of myself, I sometimes think: 'I have spent my whole life struggling to understand my motivations and impulses, and I've never quite sorted them out.'

There are parts of me that I keep secret even from myself. I have demons and I'd love to be able to healthily look at the demons and still be a wonderful actor and not feel I need them to create.

The thoughts of my emotionally so disturbed days must be found again, shifted and developed further. Here and there something of the loose remarks I make must be used, but only when it finds my attention again.

'Orphans' reflects unconscious elements in myself that were, at the time, indigestible and butting up against each other in my psyche; issues I wasn't really in touch with but was trying to put into a dramatic framework.

It's something that I had been pushing down my whole life. The search for meaning, I guess, the whispering of the soul.

Identity has been such an explosive territory for me... so hard, so painful at times.

You can't escape from yourself, can you?

I'm not even sure who I really am sometimes.

A conscience is a troublesome thing at times. I woke up at 4 o'clock this morning and I spent the time feeling what a nothing I was, and wishing I was so very different. Then the morning's post brought me a letter from a friend, saying I was so this, so that - it made me really cry, I was so grateful.

Great men suffer hours of depression through introspection and self-doubt. That is why they are great. That is why you will find modesty and humility the characteristics of such men.

The truth was that I could not manage my soul, and I was becoming aware of old age because of my weakness in the face of love.

It's not easy to know who you are and it's very painful and takes a lot of time and that is why a lot of people don't want to put in the effort.

I'm a horrible person. And it's just coming out in my work.

Woman! Do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God!

The searching for our selves is the most agonizing, isn't it? - and yet the most stimulating - and one simply cannot escape it.

When you're a confused 19-year-old filled with questions you can't even articulate and a kind of black rage that feeds at your heart from the moment you wake up in the morning, and you discover Marcus Aurelius' 'The Meditations,' that changes your life.

I went into acting as psychotherapy, and it's still a work in progress.

It is so powerful when we can leave behind our ordinary identities, no longer think of ourselves primarily as a conductor, or writer, or salesclerk, and go to a supportive environment to deeply immerse in meditation practice.

If you are fragmented and uncertain, it is terrifying to find the boundaries of yourself melt.

It's pretty intense writing about my own life, my own struggles.

I never come back home with the same moral character I went out with; something or other becomes unsettled where I had achieved internal peace; some one or other of the things I had put to flight reappears on the scene.