If you know from whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations on where you can go.
I had been sent away to help guarantee and perpetuate this indifference. No one, here, knew what was happening anywhere else. Perhaps no one ever knows that, anywhere: wherever "here" may be, it must...
The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves apprehend it, nothing can happen ... Perhaps it can't be done without the poet, but it certainly can...
Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent. Whereas other cit...
To act is to be committed and to be committed is to be in danger.
People, even if they are so thoughtless as to be born black, do not come into this world merely to provide mink coats and diamonds for chattering, trivial, pale matrons, or genocidal opportunities for...
It is a great shock at the age of 5 or 6 to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.
Most people in action are not worth very much and yet every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
I told myself all sorts of lies, standing there at the bar, but I could not move. And this was partly because I knew that it did not really matter anymore; it did not even matter if I never spoke to G...
He wanted me to come home--to come home, as he said, and settle down, and whenever he said that I thought of the sediment at the bottom of a stagnant pond.
This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.
White Americans find it as difficult as white people elsewhere do to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want. And this assum...
To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.
There is often something beautiful, there is always something awful, in the spectacle of a a person who has lost one of his faculties, a faculty he never questioned until it was gone, and who struggle...
The world should listen then, as I am listening now.
Only a man can see in the face of a woman the girl she was. It is a secret which can be revealed only to a particular man, and, then, only at his insistence. But men have no secrets, except from women...
Men - not just babies like you, but old men, too - they always need to have a woman tell them the truth.
In my experience - and this is a very awkward way to put it, since I don't really know what the word means - the strangest people in one's life are the people one has known and loved, still know and...
I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it--it, the physical act.I simply wondered about th...
For I am—or I was—one of those people who pride themselves in on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision and carry it through. This virtue, like most virtues, is ambiguity itself. People...