“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.”

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

The spirit I had caught gave me insight into the suffering of others, made me gravitate toward those whose feelings were like my own, made me sit for hours while others told me of their lives, made me strangely tender and cruel, violent and peaceful.

Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad.

But the color of a Negro’s skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target

Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.

Is not life exactly what it ought to be, in a certain sense? Isn’t it only the naive who find all of this baffling?

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.

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.

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.

Abiding in peace makes us a threat to any storm.

If we don’t help each other, who will?

Italians do not regard food as merely fuel. They regard it as medicine for the soul, one of life’s abiding pleasures.

The law-givers and the law-abiding, the beginning and the end.

In addition to the pleasure of having the piece, there is a deep and abiding pleasure for me assembling something in my head