It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.
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...
But it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening; it was the fact that when one began searching for the key to this disorder, one realized that it was not to be found in any of the usual place...
A child cannot, thank Heaven, know how vast and how merciless is the nature of power, with what unbelievable cruelty people treat each other.
They ain't never met nobody they didn't lie to and steal from.
The righteous must be able to locate the damned.
Experience which destroys innocence also leads one back to it.
The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
We held each other so close that we might indeed have been one body.
The question of identity is a question involving the most profound panic—a terror as primary as the nightmare of the mortal fall.
That summer, in any case, all the fears with which I had grown up, and which were now a part of me and controlled my vision of the world, rose up like a wall between the world and me, and drove me int...
People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.
I've begun this letter five times and torn it up five times.
I was often allowed to watch them drink their cocktails.
I was just as black as I had been the day that I was born. Therefore, when I faced a congregation, it began to take all the strength I had not to stammer, not to curse, not to tell them to throw away...
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...
He grins again, and everything inside me moves. Oh, love. Love.
You took the best, so why not take the rest?
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...
The people who think of themselves as White have the choice of becoming human or irrelevant.