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

What could I dream of that had the barest possibility of coming true?

We invented a medium of exchange, mined silver and gold, made pottery and cutlery, we fashioned tools and utensils of brass, bronze, ivory, quartz, and granite.

Reluctantly, he comes to the conclusion that to account for his book is to account for his life.

We had our own literature, our own systems of law, religion, medicine, science, and education.

The holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity.

Goddamnit, look! We live here and they live there.

I made things happen within. Because my environment was bare and bleak,

But to feel that there was feeling denied me, that the very breath of life itself was beyond my reach, that more than anything else hurt, wounded me. I had a new hunger.

Make up your mind, Snail! You are half inside your house, And halfway out!

I was not leaving the south to forget the south, but so that some day I might understand it

In me was shaping a yearning for a kind of consciousness.

The more closely the author thinks of why he wrote, the more he comes to regard his imagination as a kind of self-generating cement which glued his facts together, and his emotions as a kind of dark and obscure designer of those facts.

The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination.

We had our own civilization in Africa before we were captured and carried off to this land.

We smelted iron, danced, made music and folk poems; we sculpted, worked in glass, spun cotton and wool, wove baskets and cloth.

I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt that I had to go somewhere and do something to redeem my being alive.