I feel in myself now a faint, a dreadful stirring of what so overwhelmingly stirred in me then, great thirsty heat, and trembling, and tenderness so painful I thought my heart would burst. But out of...
He wished he could rescue her, that it was within his power to rescue her and make her life less hard. But it was only love which could accomplish the miracle of making a life bearable -- only love, a...
A real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things that can be named.
The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
To act is to be committed and to be committed is to be in danger.
These captive men are the hidden price for a hiden lie: the righteous must be able to locate the damned.
There were hardly any coloured people in the town I grew up in – how am I to know?’ And she hated herself for her next question, but she could not hold it back: ‘Don’t you think I deserve some credit,...
The root of the black man's hatred is rage, and he does not so much had the white manas simply as want the out of his way,and, more than that,out of his children's way. The root of the white man's hat...
People always seem to band together in accordance to a principle that has nothing to do with love, a principle that releases them from personal responsibility. (p. 81)
Nobody can stay in the garden of Eden, Jacques said. And then: I wonder why.
In the realm of power, Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty—necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual du...
I remember that life in that room seemed to be occurring beneath the sea, time flowed past indifferently above us, hours and days had no meaning. In the beginning our life held a joy and amazement whi...
Here was the South Side--a million in captivity--stretching from this doorstep as far as the eye could see. And they didn't even read; depressed populations don't have the time or energy to spare. The...
Colour is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.
Your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour—and in the oddest places!—for the lack of it.
The question of identity is a question involving the most profound panic—a terror as primary as the nightmare of the mortal fall.
The American idea of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American idea of masculinity. Idea may not be the precise word, for the idea of one’s sexuality can only with great violence be divorced or d...
Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but...
People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.
Joyce is right about history being a nightmare—but it may be the nightmare from which no one awaken. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.