The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons and an Unlikely Road to Manhood
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Top 10 Best Quotes
“I did not know then that this is what life is - just when you master the geometry of one world, it slips away, and suddenly again, you're swarmed by strange shapes and impossible angles.”
“We know what we are, that we walk like we are not long for this world, that this world has never longed for us.”
“To be a black male is to be always at war, and no flight to the county can save us, because even there we are met by the assupmtion of violence, by the specter of who we might turn on next.”
“Mostly they all were products of single parents, and in the most tragic category - black boys, with no particular criminal inclinations but whose very lack of direction put them in the crosshairs of the world.”
“Fuck what you have heard or what you have seen in your son. He may lie about homework and laugh when the teacher calls home. He may curse his teacher, propose arson for the whole public system. But inside is the same sense that was in me. None of us ever want to fail. None of us want to be unworthy, to not measure up.”
“On our life map, he drew a bright circle around twelve through eighteen. This was the abyss where, unguided, black boys were swallowed whole, only to reemerge on corners and prison tiers.”
“No matter was the professional talkers tell you, I never met a black boy who wanted to fail.”
“This is one of those stories where the feeling of the moment stands in for visual details.”
“Dad had turned conservative, but not in the way of the demonologists who sold us out for tenure and crumbs. More like a man who spurns the false talk of revolution for the humbler mission of resurrecting one soul at a time.”
“The rhyme pad was a spell book - it summoned asphalt elementals, elder gods, and weeping ancestors, all of whom had your back.”
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Book Keywords:
race, revolution, juvenile-delinquency, criminals, rap, black-lives-matter, right-on, words-fail, words-failed, juvenile-justice-system, race-relations, grassroots, education, one-at-a-time, moments, disappointment, direction, indescribable, words-fail-me, pretty-prose, street-music, poverty, think-global-act-local, black-boy, african-americans, opportunity, single-parenting, urban-poetry, pragmatism
