“It made me love talk that sought answers to questions that could help nobody, that could only keep alive in me that enthralling sense of wonder and awe in the face of the drama of human feeling which is hidden by the external drama of life.”

Hunger has always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger standing at my bedside, staring at my gauntly.

Pity can purge us of hostility and arouse feelings of identification with the characters, but it can also be a consoling reassurance which leads us to believe that we have understood, and that, in pitying, we have even done something to right a wrong.

I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown . . .

It had been only through books-at best, no more than vicarious cultural transfusions-that I had managaed to keep myself alive in a negatively vital way.

Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.

It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness

Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.

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.

The problem with any ideology is that it gives you the answer before you examine the evidence.

In pain, I’d rather walk with Jesus with all of my questions, than walk by myself with all the answers.

Remember, all the answers you need are inside of you; you only have to become quiet enough to hear them.

Sometimes when we don’t know the answer, it’s time to simply be with the question.

To ask the right question is harder than to answer it.

When one has success, the answer is not to undo that success. It is to continue what has been done.

Before making a decision, ask inside for guidance. Be patient and await an answer. Act only when you feel calm and certain.

I’ve never understood the female capacity to avoid a direct answer to any question.