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...
The rebirth of the soul is perpetual; only rebirth every hour could stay the hand of Satan.
The paradox, and a fearful paradox it is, is that the American Negro can have no future anywhere on any continent as long as he is unwilling to accept his past. To accept one's past--one's history--is...
The only thing white people have that black people need, or should want, is power—and no one holds power forever. White people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how to live.
The moon doth with delight Look round her when the heavens are bare; Waters on a starry night Are beautiful and fair;
The life you think you should want,’ said Eric, ‘is always the life that looks safest.
Suddenly, sitting at the window, and with a violence unprecedented, there arose in John a flood of fury and tears, and he bowed his head, fists clenched against the windowpane, crying, with teeth on e...
She was in a terrible state, for she found that she could neither take her eyes off him nor look at him.
Secrets hidden at the heart of midnight are simply waiting to be dragged to the light, as, on some unlucky high noon, they always are. But secrets shrouded in the glare of candor are bound to defeat e...
People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior.
People are full of surprise, even for themselves, if they have been stirred enough.
Of course, I must say that I don't think America is God's gift to anybody – if it is, God's days have got to be numbered. That God these people say they serve– and do serve, in ways that they don't kn...
Nothing is more unbearable, once has it, than freedom.
Negroes are Americans and their destiny is the country’s destiny. They have no other experience besides their experience on this continent and it is an experience which cannot be rejected, which yet r...
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...
It was a gesture of great despair and I knew that she was giving herself, not to me, but to that lover who would never come.
It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant—birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love, though we may not always think so—and to apprehend the nature o...
It is really quite impossible to be affirmative about anything which one refuses to question; one is doomed to remain inarticulate about about anything which one hasn’t, by an act of the imagination,...
It is part of the price the Negro pays for his position in this society that, as Richard Wright points out, he is almost always acting. A Negro learns to gauge precisely what reaction the alien person...
It doesn't do any good to fight with Sonny. Sonny just moves back, inside himself, where he can't be reached.