“Love grows from stable relationships, shared experience, loyalty, devotion, trust.”

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 did not know if the story was factually true or not, but it was emotionally true […].

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

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,

Cut your morning devotions into your personal grooming. You would not go out to work with a dirty face. Why start the day with the face of your soul unwashed?”

No person will deny that the highest degree of attainable accuracy is an object to be desired, and it is generally found that the last advances towards precision require a greater devotion of time, labour, and expense, than those which precede them.

I would steal the sun, if that is what it took to bring the light back into your eyes.

Devotion, fervor, longing! Those are my pillars. We have to be the bridge to the future.

In my dreams we got past the parking lot; you took me past the old, oak door, led me up onto the vacant altar, and offered me to every god whose name you invoked as you worshipped my body.

Knowledge without devotion to God produces hatred.

I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.

I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.