I saw my mother's face again, and felt, for the first time, how the stones of the road she had walked on must have bruised her feet. I saw the moonlit road where my father's brother died. And it broug...
I remember what it was...to be young, very young. When everything, touching and tasting-everything- was so new, and even suffering was wonderful because it was so complete.
I often wonder what I'd do if there weren't any books in the world.
I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.
His touch could never fail to make me feel desire; yet his hot, sweet breath also made me want to vomit.
But I had been in the pulpit too long and I had seen too many monstrous things. I don’t refer merely to the glaring fact that the minister eventually acquires houses and Cadillacs while the faithful c...
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. All of it, the literal and the fancif...
Love brought you here. If you trusted love this far, don't panic now.
Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid the state of being alone.
You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason.
You stop that,’ he said, in a voice which he did not recognise. ‘You stop that. You stop trying to kill me. It’s not my fault I’m white. It’s not my fault you’re black. It’s not my fault he’s dead.
You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon. We cannot be free until they are free.
You can always drive to your destination, but a true journey is made on foot.
Years ago, when he was around fourteen, he'd been all hipped on the idea of going to India. He read books about people sitting on rocks, naked, in all kinds of weather, but mostly bad, naturally, and...
What white Americans do not face when they regard a Negro reality- the fact that life is tragic. Life is tragic simply because he earth turn and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for eac...
What it comes to, finally, is that the nation has spent a large part of its time and energy looking away from one of the principal facts of its life. This failure to look reality in the face diminishe...
Vile as I am, states one of the characters in Dostoevski’s The Idiot, I don’t believe in the wagons that bring bread to humanity. For the wagons that bring bread to humanity, without any moral basis f...
Time could not be bought. The only coin time accepted was life.
This is a formula for a nation’s or a kingdom’s decline, for no kingdom can maintain itself by force alone. Force does not work the way its advocates seem to think it does. It does not, for example, r...