Nobody can stay in the garden of Eden, Jacques said. And then: I wonder why....Everyone, after all, goes the same dark road--and the road has a trick of being most dark, most treacherous, when it seem...
Whose little boy are you?
One of these days, he said. Everything bad will happen—one of these days.
Giovanni had awakened an itch, had released a gnaw in me. I realized it one afternoon, when I was taking him to work via the Boulevard Montparnasse. We had bought a kilo of cherries and we were eating...
Every man in the chapel hoped that when his hour came he, too, would be eulogized, which is to say forgiven, and that all of his lapses, greeds, errors, and strayings from the truth would be invested...
To accept one's past - one's history - is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it.
I wish I had heard him more clearly: an oblique confession is always a plea.
Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father's face, for behind your father's face as it is today are all those other faces which were his.
It was not only colored people who praised John, since they could not, John felt, in any case really know; but white people also said it, in fact had said it first and said it still. It was when John...
I remembered my mother’s insistence that I always wear clean underwear because I might get knocked down by a car on the way to or from school and I and the family would be disgraced even beyond the gr...
The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality - for this touchstone can be only oneself. Such a person interpose between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes...
Maybe everything bad that happens to you makes you weaker, said Giovanni, as though he had not heard me, and so you can stand less and less.
It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are...
The first love disappears, but never goes. That ache becomes reconciliation.
Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always be seen as untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting...
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.
My father's attitude was that this was but an inevitable phase of my growing up and he affected to take it lightly. But beneath his jocular, boys-together air, he was at a loss, he was frightened. Per...
I had never before thought of how awful the relationship must be between the musician and his instrument. He has to fill it, this instrument, with the breath of life, his own. He has to make it do wha...
Yet, if the American Negro has arrived at his identity by virtue of the absoluteness of his estrangement from his past, American white men still nourish the illusion that there is some means of recove...
And there was something so artless in this smile that I had to smile back.