And the darkness of John's sin was like the darkness of the church on Saturday evenings[...] It was like his thoughts as he moved about the tabernacle in which his life had been spent; the tabernacle...
The trouble with a secret life is that it is very frequently a secret from the person who lives it and not at all a secret for the people he encounters. He encounters, because he must encounter, those...
It goes without saying, I believe, that if we understood ourselves better, we would damage ourselves less.
It doesn't do any good to fight with Sonny. Sonny just moves back, inside himself, where he can't be reached.
Let me,’ said Cass. ‘It’s just about the only thing that a poor white woman can still do.’ Ida looked at her, and smiled. ‘Now, don’t you be like that,’ she said, ‘because you can suffer, and you’ve g...
He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all.
Love forces, at last, this humility: you cannot love if you cannot be loved, you cannot see if you cannot be seen.
Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word love here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - no...
There is something fantastic in the spectacle I now present to myself of having run so far, so hard, across the ocean even, only to find myself brought up short once more before the bulldog in my own...
There were pauses in the music for the rushing, calling, halting piano. Everything would stop except the climbing of the soloist; he would reach a height and everything would join him, the violins fir...
But just as a society must have a scapegoat, so hatred must have a symbol.
They preferred the invention because this invention expressed and corroborated their hates and fears so perfectly. It is just as well to remember that people are always doing this. Perhaps many of tho...
I guess it can’t be too often that two people can laugh and make love, too, make love because they are laughing, laugh because they’re making love. The love and the laughter come from the same place:...
What I find appalling—and really dangerous—is the American assumption that the Negro is so contented with his lot here that only the cynical agents of a foreign power can rouse him to protest. It is a...
We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible.
I'm going to pray God, said John—and his voice shook, whether with joy or grief he could not say—to keep me, and make me strong ... to stand ... to stand against the enemy ... and against everything a...
Yes, he had heard it all his life, but it was only now that his ears were opened to this sound that came from darkness, that could only come from darkness, that yet bore such sure witness to the glory...
Every society is really governed by hidden laws, by unspoken but profound assumptions on the part of the people, and ours is no exception.
Afro-Americans. Which is but a wedding, however, of two confusions, an arbitrary linking of two undefined and currently undefinable proper nouns. I mean that, in the case of Africa, Africa is still ch...
When I watched all the children, their copper, brown, and beige faces staring up at me as I taught Sunday school, I felt that I was committing a crime in talking about the gentle Jesus, in telling the...
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