In the United States, violence and heroism have been made synonymous except when it comes to blacks, and
In the Negro world, as in the white world, Negroes who have money band together and try to ignore the existence of their unluckier brothers. That is the way the love of money works. But neither money,...
In overlooking, denying, evading this complexity--which is nothing more than the disquieting complexity of ourselves--we are diminished and we perish; only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this...
In any case, white people, who had robbed black people of their liberty and who profited by this theft every hour that they lived, had no moral ground on which to stand. They had the judges, the jurie...
If your countrymen think that privacy is a crime, so much the worse for your country.
If you think of them as dirty, then they be dirty- they will be dirty because you will be giving nothing
If men don't know what's happening, what they're doing, where they're going--what are women to do? If Richard doesn't know what kind of world he wants, how am I to help him make it? What am I to tell...
If dirty words frighten you...I really don’t know how you have managed to live so long. People are full of dirty words. The only time they do not use them, most people I mean, is when they are describ...
I think people ought to do what they want to do, what else are they alive for?
I smiled and I really felt at that moment that Judas and the Savior had met in me. [...] And yet even this was not as real as my despairing sense that nothing was real for me again—unless, indeed, thi...
I saw myself, sharply, as a wanderer, an adventurer, rocking through the world, unanchored.[...]The wind of my life was blowing me away.[...]I take the blue envelope...and tear it slowly into many pie...
I remembered that life in that room seemed to be occuring beneath the sea, time flowed past indiffrently above us, hours and days had no meaning.
I learned in New Jersey that to be a Negro meant, precisely, that one was never looked at but was simply at the mercy of the reflexes the color of one’s skin caused in other people…That year in New Je...
I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which n...
I kissed her salty tears and murmured, murmured I don’t know what. I felt her body straining, straining to meet mine and I felt my own contracting and drawing away and I knew that I had begun the long...
I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass.
I had decided to allow no room in the universe for something which shamed and frightened me.
I existed somewhere between yesterday’s memories and tomorrow’s expectations. The time allotted by the gods to a sedentary man with a sedentary mind can be too much; and yet, for a seeker, it is never...
I don’t like people who like me because I’m a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt.
I do not think, if one is a writer, that one escapes it by trying to become something else. One does not become something else: one becomes nothing. And what is crucial here is that the writer, howeve...