“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.”

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,

But to feel that there was feeling denied me, that the very breath of life itself was beyond my reach, that more than anything else hurt, wounded me. I had a new hunger.

Forgetfulness of self is remembrance of God.

That the self advances and confirms the ten thousand things is called delusion; that the ten thousand things advance and confirm the self is called enlightenment.

I’m all self-taught. I never had a teacher. Even for English, and French, and German, I hardly went to school.

Without self-respect there can be no genuine success. Success won at the cost of self-respect is not success ? for what shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own self-respect.

Apocalypse can mean the unveiling of the deeper self of humanity.

The great wisdom traditions of the world all recognize that the main impediment to living a life of meaning is being self-absorbed.

I bear witness, O my God, that Thou hast created me to know Thee and to worship Thee. I testify, at this moment, to my powerlessness and to Thy might, to my poverty and to Thy wealth. There is none other God but Thee, the Help in Peril, the Self-Subsisting.

Discover that we are capable of solitary joy and having experienced it, know that we have touched the core of self.