There was a hunger for power reaching out of the senses of man and trying to say something in the symbols of action.
The day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever, Howe declared. It made impossible a repetition of the old lies [and] brought out into the open, as no one ever had before, the hatred...
So he held toward them an attitude of iron reserve; he lived with them, but behind a wall, a curtain. And toward himself he was even more exacting.
So far removed are these practices from what the average American citizen encounters in his daily life that it takes a huge act of his imagination to believe that it is true;
She twisted from him and ran, nude, to the opposite wall. When he came at her this time §he screamed again and ran into the kitchen. She flicked on the light and stood nude amid the white refrigerator...
Pale yellow sunshine fell through high windows and slashed the air.
Not only had he lived where they told him to live, not only had he done what they told him to do, not only had he done these things until he had killed to be quit of them ; but even after obeying, aft...
Men are inventing ideas every day to justify for themselves and others their actions and needs.
It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.
I had tasted what to me was life, and I would have more of it, somehow, someway.
How constantly and overwhelmingly the advertisements, radios, newspapers and movies play upon us! But in thinking of them remember that to many they are tokens of mockery.
Held at bay by the hate of others, preoccupied with his own feelings, he was continuously at war with reality.
Dewdrop joins dewdropTill a petal holds a poolReflecting its rose.
there are times when life's ends are so raveled that reason and sense cry out that we stop and gather them together again before we can proceed
Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.
Shaking hands I was doing something that I was to do countless times in the years to come: acting in conformity with what others expected of me even though, by the very nature and form of my life, I d...
Whether he’ll follow some gaudy, hysterical leader who’ll promise rashly to fill the void in him, or whether he’ll come to an understanding with the millions of his kindred fellow workers under trade-...
They wouldn’t let me live and I killed. Maybe it ain’t fair to kill, and I reckon I really didn’t want to kill.
These conditions reflected the failures of modern civilization—the death of genuine spiritual values and traditions, the harsh ness of economic greed and exploitation, the avarice for glittering mater...
There are times, Your Honor, when reality bears features of such an impellingly moral complexion that it is impossible to follow the hewn path of expediency. There are times when life’s ends are so ra...