In my career as a writer I have always been attracted to morbid themes—suicide, rape, murder, military life, marriage, slavery.
A good book should leave you....slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.
—retaining the other half for yourself in savings for the future. Thereupon, at Mr. Pemberton’s good report of your labor—and again I have no doubt that this might be anything but exemplary—I shall dr...
Counted my money and reckoned my total worth at something less than fifty dollars. Although, as I said, I was without real fear in my plight, I could not help feeling a trifle insecure, especially
Therefore, they is only one thing to do … Here I stopped speaking altogether for a while, allowing these last words to enter their consciousness. Minutes passed and they said nothing, then Henry’s voi...
For those who have dwelt in depression's dark wood, and known its inexplicable agony, their return from the abyss is not unlike the ascent of the poet, trudging upward and upward out of hell's black d...
The fate of Bobby Weed at the hands of white Southern Americans is as bottomlessly barbaric as any act performed by the Nazis during the rule of Adolf Hitler! Do
Servomechanism in which a moral vacuum had been so successfully sucked clean of every molecule of real qualm or scruple that his own descriptions of the unutterable crimes he perpetrated daily seem of...
This was not judgment day - only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.
One of the century’s most famous intellectual pronouncements comes at the beginning of The Myth of Sisyphus: There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether...
For without knowing the white man at close hand, without having submitted to his wanton and arrogant kindnesses, without having smelled the smell of his bedsheets and his dirty underdrawers and the in...
Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self—to the mediating intellect—as to verge close to being beyond description.
Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.
The iron determination with which we must carry out Hitler’s orders could only be obtained by a stifling of all human emotions.
It is more often than not the person one loves from whom one withholds the most searing truths about one’s self, if only out of the very human motive to spare groundless pain.
Almost unique in Eastern Europe in possessing its own constitution, called even now the Magdeburg rights and based upon medieval laws formulated in the city of Magdeburg? Was
What this country needs... what this great land of ours needs is something to happen to it. Something ferocious and tragic, like what happened to Jericho or the cities of the plain - something terribl...
Though it is a painful fact that most Negroes are hopelessly docile, many of them are filled with fury, and the unctuous coating of flattery which surrounds and encases that fury is but a form of self...
The grief is coming now, she said to herself: He’s beginning to know what suffering is. Perhaps that’s good in a way. Even he. Perhaps that’s good for a man—finally to know what suffering is, to know...
Such was the vainglory of a black boy who may have been alone among his race in bondage to have actually read pages from Sir Walter Scott and who knew the product of nine multiplied by nine, the name...