I would give almost anything I own to be alive when that day comes, as it surely will, when Harry Byrd sees negro men and women sitting not at the back of the bus but riding free and equal through all...
I was so completely dependent on him, you see, and that was not a healthy thing.
I don’t know what to say. Don’t try, she said, sighing. Oh, it’s so hot! And thought, Indeed if I consider Charlottesville that will be all. Which is worse, past or future? Neither. I will fold up my...
Hogwash! he exclaimed. Christianity is finished and done with. Don’t you know that, Reverend? And don’t you realize further that it was the message contained in Holy Scripture that was the cause, the...
I get a fine warm feeling when I'm doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let's face it, writing is hell.
La negra noche del alma humana cuando millones de inocentes sufrían y morían bajo la dominación nazi.
Eponymous
Besotted
There are friends one makes at a youthful age in whom one simply rejoices, for whom one possesses a love and loyalty mysteriously lacking in the friendships made in after-years, no matter how genuine.
The libido also made an early exit, as it does in most major illnesses—it is the superfluous need of a body in beleaguered emergency.
Someday I will understand Auschwitz. This was a brave statement but innocently absurd. No one will ever understand Auschwitz. What I might have set down with more accuracy would have been: Someday I w...
Most people in the grip of depression at its ghastliest are, for whatever reason, in a state of unrealistic hopelessness, torn by exaggerated ills and fatal threats that bear no resemblance to actuali...
Mercifully, I was at that age when reading was still a passion and thus, save for a happy marriage, the best state possible in which to keep absolute loneliness at bay. I could not have made it throug...
It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
It is a positive and active anguish, a sort of psychical neuralgia wholly unknown to normal life.
In depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come- not in a d...
In debate, especially when the dispute is hot and supercharged and freighted with ill will, I have always been the flabbiest of contenders. My voice breaks, becomes shrill; I sweat. I get a sloppy hal...
I could scarcely remember a time when I was not haunted by the idea of slavery, or was not profoundly conscious of the strange bifurcated world of whiteness and blackness in which I was born and reare...
AN EXQUISITELY SHARPENED HATRED FOR the white man is of course an emotion not difficult for Negroes to harbor. Yet if truth be known, this hatred does not abound in every Negro’s soul; it relies upon...
The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a happy bunch of chuckleheads.