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,...
Wherever I found religion in my life I found strife, the attempt of one individual or group to rule another in the name of God. The naked will to power seemed always to walk in the wake of a hymn.
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...
Then, first of all, let us admit that there is no such thing as objectivity, no such objective fact as objectivity. Objectivity is a fabricated concept, a synthetic intellectual construction...
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...
My mother's suffering grew into a symbol in my mind, gathering to itself all the poverty, the ignorance, the helplessness; the painful, baffling, hunger-ridden days and hours; the restless moving, the...
Life had made the plot over and over again, to the extent that I knew it by heart.
It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than than a sense of life itself. All my life had shaped me for the realism, the matu...
I listened, vaguely knowing now that I had committed some awful wrong that I could not undo, that I had uttered words I could not recall even though I ached to nullify them, kill them, turn back time...
Hence, there is no such thing as an absolute objectivity of attitude. The most rigorously determined attitude of objectivity is, at best, relative. We are human; we are the slaves of our assumptions,...
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...
He had been defeated by that which he had sought to destroy.
Did you ever feel happy in church? Naw. I didn’t want to. Nobody but poor folks get happy in church. But you are poor, Bigger.Again Bigger’s eyes lit with a bitter and feverish pride. I ain’t that poo...
Cross felt that at the heart of all political movements the concept of the basic inequality of man was enthroned and practiced, and the skill of politicians consisted in how cleverly they hid this ele...
But the color of a Negro's skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target
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...
And if Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him.
A writer who hasn't written anything worth-while is a most doubtful person.
As I, in memory, think back now upon those girls and their lives I feel that for white America to understand the significance of the problem of the Negro will take a bigger and tougher America than an...
He felt that they ruled him, even when they were far away and not thinking of him, ruled him by conditioning him in his relations to his own people. The