“And they do not know why; they are powerless pawns in a blind play of social forces.”

Kill them, turn back time to the moment before I had talked so that I could have another chance to save myself.

He had lived and acted on the assumption that he was alone, and now he saw that he had not been. What he had done made others suffer.

All literature is protest.

Anything seemed possible, likely, feasible, because I wanted everything to be possible… Because I had no power to make things happen outside of me in the objective world.

They hate because they fear, and they fear because they feel that the deepest feelings of their lives are being assaulted and outraged.

It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.

It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than a sense of life itself.

Somewhere in the dead of the southern night my life had switched onto the wrong track and without my knowing it.

The locomotive of my heart was rushing down a dangerously steep slope, heading for a collision, heedless of the warning red lights that blinked all about me, the sirens and the ells and the screams that filled the air.

No matter how much he would long for them to forget him, they would not be able to. His family was a part of him, not only in blood, but in spirit.

I didn’t know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for ’em.

Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.

We black and they white. They got things and we ain’t. They do things and we can’t. It’s just like livin’ in jail.

I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns and, perhaps, to bloom

Violence is a personal necessity for the oppressed…It is not a strategy consciously devised. It is the deep, instinctive expression of a human being denied individuality.

I could think of nothing. And, slowly, it was upon exactly that nothingness that my mind began to dwell, that constant sense of wanting without having, of being hated without reason.

I think that most people think painters are kind of ridiculous, you know?

I’ve led a career of having to take work to see my family, over picking and choosing, instead of ‘I need food on the table and I don’t know how I’m going to pay the mortgage.’

You can hear, like, you know, Africans and Jamaicans doing it just kind of as, like, a rhythmic, poetic conversation, you know, to a rhythm.

I already know my size. I don’t need reminding.

We all know you’re beautiful, scott.

To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God.

The big tradition, I think, is unity. And I have that in mind; and with that, you know, you could break all the traditions- all the other so-called rules, because they are stylistic.. and most are not true.

There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.