Ovunque, nella mia vita, io abbia incontrato la religione, ho trovato la discordia, il tentativo di un individuo o di un gruppo di dominare un altro in nome di Dio.
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...
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...
That abandoned house,With its yard of fallen leaves,In the setting sun.
The southern whites would rather have had Negroes who stole, work for them than Negroes who knew, however dimly, the worth of their own humanity. Hence, whites placed a premium upon black deceit; they...
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.
A knowledge of how to live was a knowledge of how to die.
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.
But the color of a Negro's skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target
Hate yearned to destroy and sought to forget, but love could not. Love strove creatively towards days that had yet to come.
Having been thrust out of the world because of my race, I had accepted my destiny by not being curious about what shaped it
How oppression seems to hinder and stifle in the victim those very qualities of character which are so essential for an effective struggle against the oppressor. Then
Humnnn, he grunted, then laughed. A dog bite can’t hurt a nigger. It’s swelling and it hurts, I said. If it bothers you, let me know, he said. But I never saw a dog yet that could really hurt a nigger...
I did not act in this fashion deliberately; I did not prefer this kind of relationship with people. I wanted a life in which there was a constant oneness of feeling with others, in which the basic emo...
I forged more notes and my trips to the library became frequent. Reading grew into a passion. My first serious novel was Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street. It made me see my boss, Mr. Gerald, and identify...
They felt that it was much easier and safer to rob their own people, for they knew that white policemen never really searched diligently for Negroes who committed crimes against other Negroes.
I knew what was wrong with me, but I could not correct it. The words and actions ofwhite people were baffling signs to me. I was living in a culture and not a civilization and Icould learn how that cu...
In all my life— though surrounded by many people— I had not had a single satisfying, sustained relationship with another human being and, not having had any, I did not miss it. I made no demands whate...
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...
These fantasies were no longer a reflection of my reaction to the white people, they were a part of my living, of my emotional life; they were a culture, a creed, a religion. The hostility of the whit...
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