This illusion owes everything to the great American illusion that our state is a state to be envied by other people: we are powerful, and we are rich. But our power makes us uncomfortable and we handl...
Therefore, whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.
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...
There are people in the world for whom coming along is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.
The world should listen then, as I am listening now.
The sons of the masters were roaming the world, looking for arms to hold them. And the arms that might have held them--could not forgive.
The impossible is the least that one can demand.
Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his...
Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.
One writes out of one thing only--one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only re...
One of the most terrible, most mysterious things about a life is that a warning can be heeded only in retrospect: too late.
Observing that, from this height, the city which had been so dark as he walked through it seemed to be on fire.
Love was a country he knew nothing about.
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...
It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.
Isn't love more important than colour?
Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect...
If I could make you stay, I would,’ he shouted. ‘If I had to beat you, chain you, starve you—if I could make you stay, I would.’ He turned back into the room; the wind blew his hair. He shook his fing...
I was often allowed to watch them drink their cocktails.
I was in a terrible confusion. Sometimes I thought, but this is your life. Stop fighting it. Stop fighting. Or I thought, but I am happy. And he loves me. I am safe. Sometimes, when he was not near me...