“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.”

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

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.

Everything you do counts forever. You are an expression of the whole process of creation; you are a cocreator.

Do you know why language manifests itself the way it does in my work? It’s because I understand short attention spans.

I prefer to leave the paintings to speak for themselves.

For the trustees to turn away from the entirely reasonable request of the students that a hearing-impaired individual be made president of the college is a very unfortunate expression of insensitivity.

I suddenly realize that I’m naked, which shouldn’t bother me since it’s the phone, but for some reason it does. “How’s it hanging?” Kyra asks and now I think I’m blushing. It’s just an expression, but jeez!

You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.

All of it had an impact – as did happenings – because I could see that art was changing from expressionism, which I was doing at the time, or thought I was doing. But it wasn’t the direction I really wanted to go.

It’s ecstasy when you’re laying down next to me.