She was so incredibly beautiful—she seemed to be wearing the sunlight, rearranging it around her from time to time, with a movement of one hand, with a movement of her head, and with her smile—that, w...
Perhaps he is a fool and a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.
Our people have functioned in this country for nearly a century as political weapons, the trump card up the enemies' sleeve; anything promised Negroes at election time is also a threat leveled at the...
One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.
On days like this, Cass said, suddenly, I remember what it was like--I think I remember--to be young, very young. She looked up at him. When everything, touching and tasting--everything--was so new, a...
Negroes know how little most white people are prepared to implement their words with deeds, how little, when the chips are down, they are prepared to risk. And this long history of moral evasion has h...
NEGROES IN THE NORTH ARE right when they refer to the South as the Old Country. A Negro born in the North who finds himself in the South is in a position similar to that of the son of the Italian emig...
My progress reportconcerning my journey to the palace of wisdomis discouraging.I lack certain indispensable aptitudes.
Men do not like to be protected, it emasculates them. This is what black men know, it is the reality they have lived with; it is what white men do not want to know. It is not a pretty thing to be a fa...
Love him,’ said Jacques, with vehemence, ‘love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters? And how long, at the best, can it last, since you are both men and stil...
Life, it is true, is a process of decisions and alternatives, the conscious awareness and acceptance of limitations. Experience, nevertheless, to say nothing of history, seems clearly to indicate that...
It was Southern, therefore, to put it brutally, because of the history of America—the United States of America: and small black boys and girls were now paying for this holocaust. They were attempting...
It seemed, then, that a lifetime would not be long enough for me to act with Joey the act of love.
It is very nearly impossible . . . to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind. --They Can’t Turn Back, in Mademoiselle (New York, Aug. 1960; repr. in The Price of...
It is savagely, if one may say so, ironical that the only proof the world -- mankind -- has ever had of White supremacy is in the Black face and voice: that face never scrutinized, that voice never he...
It is quite impossible to write a worth-while novel about a Jew or a Gentile or a Homosexual, for people refuse, unhappily, to function in so neat and one-dimensional a fashion.
It is only now beginning to be borne in on us—very faintly, it must be admitted, very slowly, and very much against our will—that this vision of the world is dangerously inaccurate, and perfectly usel...
It is not too much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being ... must first divorce himself from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church. If the conc...
It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have. --The Price of the Ticket, No Name in the Street (1972; repr. 1985) The
It doesn't do to look too hard into this mystery, which is as far from being simple as it is from being safe. We don't know enough about ourselves. I think it's better to know that you don't know, tha...