He lay still, his bloodshot eyes staring blankly before him, and drifted into dreams of his problems, compulsively living out dialogues, summing up emotional scenes with his mother, Dot, and his frien...
He did not like me and I did not like him, though I tried harder than he to conceal my dislike.
Anything seemed possible, likely, feasible, because I wanted everything to be possible... Because I had no power to make things happen outside of me in the objective world, I made things happen within...
They hate because they fear, and they fear because they feel that the deepest feelings of their lives are being assaulted and outraged. And they do not know why; they are powerless pawns in a blind pl...
I had once tried to write, had once reveled in feeling, had let m crude imagination roam, but the impulse to dream had been slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and i hungered...
I felt that without a common bond uniting men, without a continuous current of shared thought and feeling circulating through the social system, like blood coursing through the body, there could be no...
Hunger has always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger standing at my bedside, staring at my gauntly.
Color hate defined the place of black life as below that of white life; and the black man, responding to the same dreams as the white man, strove to bury within his heart his awareness of this differe...
176 Winter rain at night Sweetening the taste of bread And spicing the soup.
It was no longer a matter of whether I would steal or lie or murder; it was a simple, urgent matter of public pride, a matter of how much I had in common with other people.
Sweep away the cloudsAnd let a dome of blue skyGive this sea a name!
Public peace is the act of public trust; it is the faith that all are secure and will remain secure.
Pity can purge us of hostility and arouse feelings of identification with the characters, but it can also be a consoling reassurance which leads us to believe that we have understood, and that, in pit...
One can account for just so much of life, and then no more. At least, not yet. With
I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown . . .I was taking a part of the Southto transplant in alien soil,to see if it could grow differently,if it could drink of new and cool rains,be...
I had written a book of short stories which was published under the title of Uncle Tom's Children. When the review of that book began to appear, I realized that I had made an awful naive mistake. I fo...
How soon will someone speak the word the resentful millions will understand: the word to be, to act, to live?
....I wondered if there had been a more corroding and devastating attack upon the personalities of men than the idea of racial discrimination.
If you posses enough courage to speak out what you are, you will find that you are not alone.
Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books...