There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain. You ought to have some apprehension that th...
The writer trapped among a speechless people is in danger of becoming speechless himself. For then he has no mirror, no corroborations of his essential reality; and this means that he has no grasp of...
The situation, therefore, in the colonial countries, is tragic, Cesaire continued. Wherever colonization is a fact the indigenous culture begins to rot. And, among these ruins, something begins to be...
The projects in Harlem are hated. They are hated almost as much as policemen, and this is saying a great deal. And they are hated for the same reason: both reveal, unbearably, the real attitude of the...
The people who have managed to get off this block have only got as far as a more respectable ghetto. This respectable ghetto does not even have the advantages of the disreputable one—friends, neighbor...
The journey to the grave is already begun, the journey to corruption is, always, already, half over.
The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.
The fear that I heard in my father's voice... when he realized that I really believed I could do, anything a white boy could do, and had every intention of proving it, was not at all like the fear I h...
The American Negro is a unique creation; he has no counterpart anywhere, and no predecessors. The Muslims react to this fact by referring to the Negro as the so-called American Negro and substituting...
That door is the gateway he has sought so long out of this dirty world, this dirty body. It’s getting late. The body in the mirror forces me to turn and face it. And I look at my body, which is under...
She did not know why he so adored things that were so long dead; what sustenance they gave him, what secrets he hoped to wrest from them. But she understood, at least, that they did give him a kind of...
Richard and I seemed really to be at the end of our rope, for he had done what he could for me, and it had not worked out, and now he was going away. It seemed to me that he was sailing into the most...
People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and t...
People don't have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you're dead, when they've killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn't have any character...
Out of joy strength came, strength that was fashioned to bear sorrow: sorrow brought forth joy. Forever? This was Ezekiel's wheel, in the middle of the burning air forever -- and the little wheel ran...
One would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance… totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of thi...
One day, Richard would turn to me, with the light of sudden understanding on his face, and say, Oh, that’s what you mean. And then, so ran the dream, a great and invaluable dialogue would have begun....
Oedipus did not remember the thongs that bound his feet; nevertheless the marks they left testified to that doom toward which his feet were leading him. The man does not remember the hand that struck...
Now, one hears from a long time ago that white is merely a state of mind. I add to that, white is a moral choice. It's up to you to be as white as you want to be and pay the price of that ticket. You...
Now, from this night, this coming morning, no matter how many beds I find myself in between now and my final bed, I shall never be able to have any more of those boyish, zestful affairs--which are, re...