I am not trying to be méchant when I talk about women. I respect women—very much—for their inside life, which is not like the life of a man.
Furthermore, it is now absolutely clear that white people are a minority in the world—so severe a minority that they now look rather more like an invention—and that they cannot possibly hope to rule i...
For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease...
For a woman, she said, I think a man is always a stranger. And there’s something awful about being at the mercy of a stranger.
Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise.
But what was the point, the purpose, of my salvation if it did not permit me to behave with love toward others, no matter how they behaved toward me? What others did was their responsibility, for whic...
But the policemen were doing nothing now. Obviously, this was not because they had become more human but because they were under orders and because they were afraid. And indeed they were, and I was de...
But I know about suffering; if that helps. I know that it ends. I ain’t going to tell you no lies, like it always ends for the better. Sometimes it ends for the worse. You can suffer so bad that you c...
At length, she lay beside him like a burden laid down at evening which must be picked up once more in the morning.
Assimilation was frequently but another name for the very special brand of relations between human beings which had been imposed by colonialism. These relations demanded that the individual, torn from...
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor; and if one is a member of a captive population, economically speaking, one's feet have simply been placed on...
And yet - when one begins to search for the crucial, the definitive moment, the moment which changed all others, one finds one-self pressing, in great pain, through a maze of false signals and abruptl...
And these nights were being acted out under a foreign sky, with no one to watch, no penalties attached—it was this last fact which was our undoing for nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than...
And then, again, I was undergoing with my father what the very young inevitability undergo with their elders: I was beginning to judge him. And the very harshness of this judgement, which broke my hea...
And the others, who have avoided all of these deaths, get up in the morning and go downtown to meet the man. They work in the white man’s world all day and come home in the evening to this fetid block...
All cultures have, furthermore, an economic, social, and political base, and no culture can continue to live if its political destiny is not in its own hands. Any political and social regime which des...
All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, a...
Ah! she said, men may be at the mercy of womenI think men like that idea, it strokes the misogynist in them. But if a particular is ever at the mercy of a particular why, he's somehow stopped being a...
ANY REAL CHANGE IMPLIES THE breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine...
The righteous must be able to locate the damned.