“Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.”

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.

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.

Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be.

By the time I got writing ‘Halcyon,’ I was on a roll, and I realized I had so much to write about, I realized I had so much built up inside that I couldn’t really alleviate before, and then all of a sudden it was like reservoir burst.

I used to have a little whisky before I went on stage. I realized that could have slowly turned into something a bit more serious. I get hyped up. I also think doing it a lot, you get used to it. You get more confidence. It’s confidence building, really.

People may oppose you, but when they realize you can hurt them, they’ll join your side.

I’ve come to the realisation that I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing half the time.

But when we came out of camp, that’s when I first realized that being in camp, that being Japanese-American, was something shameful.

Your first realization when you become an important person is that all day and all night, whatever the circumstances, people want to hear you talk about yourself.

There is nothing new in the realization that the Constitution sometimes insulates the criminality of a few in order to protect the privacy of us all.