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...
Every movement of his body is an unconscious protest. Every desire, every dream, no matter how intimate or personal, is a plot or a conspiracy. Every hope is a plan for insurrection. Every glance of t...
America, I knew that Negroes had never been allowed to catch the full spirit of Western civilization, that they lived somehow in it but not of it. And when I brooded upon the cultural barrenness of bl...
Toward no one in the world did he feel any fear now, for he knew that fear was useless; and toward no one in the world did he feel any hate now, for he knew that hate would not help him. Though
But rape was not what one did to women. Rape was what one felt when one's back was against the wall and one had to strike out, whether one wanted to or not, to keep the pack from killing one. He commi...
Bob had been caught by the white death, the threat of which hung over every male black in the South. I had heard whispered tales of black boys having sex relations with white prostitutes in the hotels...
When I tried to talk to him I realized that, though ties of blood made us kin, though I could see a shadow of my face in his face, though there was an echo of my voice in his voice, we were forever st...
Quiet. But when no one was looking I would slip into Ella’s room and steal a book and take it back of the barn and try to read it. Usually I could not decipher enough words to make the story have mean...
In a boy like Bigger, young, unschooled, whose subjective life was clothed in the tattered rags of American culture, this primitive fear and ecstasy were naked, exposed, unprotected by religion or a f...
This Court should not sit to fix punishment for this boy; it should sit to ponder why there are not more like him! And there are, Your Honor. If it were not for the backwaters of religion, gambling an...
That abandoned house,With its yard of fallen leaves,In the setting sun.
Naw. But I just can’t get used to it, Bigger said. I swear to God I can’t. I know I oughtn’t think about it, but I can’t help it. Every time I think about it I feel like somebody’s poking a red-hot ir...
My mother's suffering grew into as 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, th...
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...
If laying down my life could stop the suffering in the world I'd do it. But I don't believe anything can stop it.
From far beyond the horizons that bound this bleak plantation there had come to me through my living the knowledge that my father was a black peasant who had gone to the city seeking life, but who had...
Even though Mr. Dalton gave millions of dollars for Negro education, he would rent houses to Negroes only in this prescribed area, this corner of the city tumbling down from rot. In a sullen way Bigge...
A dread of white people now came to live permanently in my feelings and imagination. As the war drew to a close, racial conflict flared over the entire South, and though I did not witness any of it, I...
I have found that to tell the truth is the hardest thing on earth. Harder than fighting in a war, harder than taking part in a revolution.If you try it, you will find that at times sweat will break up...