“At the age of twelve I had an attitude toward life that was to endure, that was to make me seek those areas of living that would keep it alive, that was to make me skeptical of everything while seeking everything, tolerant of all and yet critical.”

there are times when life’s ends are so raveled that reason and sense cry out that we stop and gather them together again before we can proceed

I listened, vaguely knowing now that I had committed some awful wrong that I could not undo, that I had uttered words I could not recall even though I ached to nullify them.

If you’ve a notion of what man’s heart is, wouldn’t you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man’s frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from himself?

A mode of being that the way of life about me had said could not be, must not be, and upon which the penalty of death had been placed.

Each day when you see us black folk upon the dusty land of your farm or upon the hard pavement of your city streets.

I endowed it with unlimited potentialities, redeemed it for the sake of my own hungry and cloudy yearning.

You usually take it for granted and think you know us, but our history is far stranger than you suspect, and we are not what we seem.

I could endure the hunger. I had learned to live with hate.

Don’t leave inferences to be drawn when evidence can be presented.

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

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.