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...
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...
I steal by lawns and grassy plots, I slide by hazel 6 covers; I move the sweet forget-me-nots That grow for happy lovers. I slip, I slide, I gloom, 7 I glance, Among my skimming swallows; I make the n...
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 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 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 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...
I did not tell him my decision, that would have broken my will. I did not wait to have breakfast with him but only drank some coffee and made an excuse to go home. I knew the excuse did not fool Joey;...
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.
He looked like a baby, his mouth half open, his cheek flused, his curly hair darkening the pillow and half hiding his damp round forehead and his long eyelashes glinting slightly in the summer sun. We...
From my own point of view, the fact of the Third Reich alone makes obsolete forever any question of Christian superiority, except in technological terms. White
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.
Fonny had found something that he could do, that he wanted to do, and this saved him from the death that was waiting to overtake the children of our age. Though the death took many forms, though peopl...
But the Negro’s experience of the white world cannot possibly create in him any respect for the standards by which the white world claims to live.
But that battered word, truth, having made its appearance here, confronts one immediately with a series of riddles and has, moreover, since so many gospels are preached, the unfortunate tendency to ma...
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...
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...