My days and nights were one long, quiet, continuously contained dream of teror, tension, and anxiety. I wondered how long I could bear it.
Maybe I would’ve been all right if I could’ve done something I wanted to do. I wouldn’t be scared then. Or mad, maybe. I wouldn’t be always hating folks; and maybe I’d feel at home, sort of.
It was a highly geared world whose nature was conflict and action, a world whose limited area and vision imperiously urged men to satisfy their organisms, a world that existed on a plane of animal sen...
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...
How could one find out about life when one was about to die?
Hate yearned to destroy and sought to forget, but love could not. Love strove creatively towards days that had yet to come.
Tôi nóng lòng học để đọc tiểu thuyết và tôi dày vò mẹ tôi để mẹ giải thích cho tôi nghĩa mọi từ xa lạ tôi gặp, không phải vì từ ngữ có một giá trị tự thân, mà vì rằng đây là chìa khóa của một thế giới...
Nigger, you sure ought to be glad it was us you talked to that way. You’re a lucky bastard, ’cause if you’d said that to some other white man, you might’ve been a dead nigger now. I was learning rapid...
In 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 life, I d...
If only ten or twenty Negroes had been put into slavery, we would call it injustice, but there were hundreds of thousands of them throughout the country. If this state of affairs had lasted for two or...
I picked up a pencil and held it over a sheet of white paper, but my feelings stood in the way of my words. Well, I would wait, day and night, until I knew what to say. Humbly now, with no vaulting dr...
I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt that I had to go somewhere and do something to redeem my being alive.
He had lived and acted on the assumption that he was alone, and now he saw that he had not been. What he had done made others suffer. No matter how much he would long for them to forget him, they woul...
Even the cat smilesWhen the hen swallows waterWith back-tilted head.
As long as he could remember, he had never been responsible to anyone. The moment a situation became so that it exacted something of him, he rebelled. That was the way he lived; he passed his days try...
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...
I wish I could be an example to you...I knew that I had conquered him, had rid myself of him mentally and emotionally; but I wanted to be sure.You are not an example to me; you could never be, I spat...
Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the...
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,...
Life had made the plot over and over again, to the extent that I knew it by heart.