I didn’t want to kill! Bigger shouted. But what I killed for, I am! It must’ve been pretty deep in me to make me kill! I must have felt it awful hard to murder….What I killed for must’ve been good! Bi...
The hostility of the whites had become so deeply implanted in my mind and feelings that it had lost direct connection with the daily environment in which I lived; and my reactions to this hostility fe...
I had never in my life been abused by whites, but I had already become as conditioned to their existence as though I had been the victim of a thousand lynchings.
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...
The world of most men is given to them by their culture..
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...
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...
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...
Violence is a personal necessity for the oppressed...It is not a strategy consciously devised. It is the deep, instinctive expression of a human being denied individuality.
With ever watchful eyes and bearing scars, visible and invisible, I headed North, full of a hazy notion that life could be lived with dignity, that the personalities of others should not be violated,...
If you've a notion of what man's heart is, wouldn't you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man's frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from hims...
Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books...
It made me love talk that sought answers to questions that could help nobody, that could only keep alive in me that enthralling sense of wonder and awe in the face of the drama of human feeling which...
It was fear that had made him fight Gus in the poolroom. If he had felt certain of himself and of Gus, he would not have fought.
If a man confessed anything on his death bed, it was the truth; for no man could stare death in the face and lie.
Over spring mountainsA star ends the paragraphOf a thunderstorm.
As he stumbled along a high bright object caught his eyes; he looked up. Atop a building across the street, above the heads of the people, loomed a flaming cross. At once he knew that it had something...
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...
He was not concerned with whether these acts were right or wrong; they simply appealed to him as possible avenues of escape. He felt that some day there would be a black man who would whip the black p...
My imaginings, of course, had no objective value whatever. My spontaneous fantasies lived in my mind because I felt completely helpless in the face of this threat that might come upon me at any time,...
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