Dammit, white folk are always giving orders, it's a habit with them. Why didn't you make an excuse? You're black and living in the South-- did you forget how to lie?
But on the other hand, it would be a great mistake to assume that the dead are absolutely powerless.
With all your speechmaking and studying I thought you understood something. But you . . . All right, go ahead. See Norton. You'll find that he wants you disciplined; he might not know it, but he does....
Thus for one lone stretch of time I lived with the intensity displayed by those chronic numbers players who see clues to their fortune in the most minute and insignificant phenomena: in clouds, on pas...
Poor stumblers, neither of you can see the other. To you he is a mark on the scorecard of your achievement, a thing and not a man; a child, or even less--a black amorphous thing. And you, for all your...
Our fate is to become one, and yet many— This is not prophecy, but description.
Now, aware of my invisibility, I live rent-free in a building rented strictly to whites, in a section of the basement that was shut off and forgotten during the nineteenth century, which I discovered...
Nothing ever stops; it divides and multiplies, and I guess sometimes it gets ground down superfine, but it doesn't just blow away.
Nor could I see any reason for allowing our more chastened view of political possibility (not too long before I began this novel A. Phillip Randolph had to threaten our beloved F.D.R. with a march on...
No indeed, the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.
I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.
I could feel their eyes, saw them all and saw too the time when they would know that my prospects were ended and saw already the contempt they'd feel for me, a college man who had lost his prospects a...
Here are the facts. He was standing and he fell. He fell and he kneeled. He kneeled and he bled. He bled and he died. He fell in a heap like any man and his blood spilled out like any blood; red as an...
What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
They were very much the same, each attempting to force his picture of reality upon me and neither giving a hoot in hell for how things looked to me.
Running from the birds to what, I didn't know. I ran. Why was I here at all? I ran through the night, ran within myself. Ran.
Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization...
Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.
But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?