I know now that all people hunger for a noble, unsullied past, that as sure as the black nationalist dreams of a sublime Africa before the white man's corruption, so did Thomas Jefferson dream of an idyllic Britain before the Normans, so do all of us dream of some other time when things were so simple. I know now that that hunger is a retreat from the knotty present into myth and that what ultimately awaits those who retreat into fairy tales, who seek refuge in the mad pursuit to be made great again, in the image of greatness that never was, is tragedy. TaNehisi Coates
Some Similar Quotes
  1. It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages. - Friedrich Nietzsche

  2. There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature. - Jane Austen

  3. If I had a flower for every time I thought of you... I could walk through my garden forever. - Alfred Tennyson

  4. You are my best friend as well as my lover, and I do not know which side of you I enjoy the most. I treasure each side, just as I have treasured our life together. - Nicholas Sparks

  5. Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grassthe world is too full to talk about. - Jalaluddin Rumi

More Quotes By TaNehisi Coates
  1. Hope in the beginning feels like such a violation of the loss, and yet without it we couldn't survive.

  2. The real hell of this, " he told her, "is that you're going to get through it.

  3. The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline had died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence, and linear expectations, where I thught grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and...

  4. Mostly I couldn't bear... the paltry notion that memory was all that eternal life really meant, and I spent too much time wondering where people got the fortitude or delusion to keep on moving past the static dead.

  5. I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures....We tell the story to get them back, to capture the traces of footfalls through the snow.

Related Topics