A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.
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.
Certain writing instrument—became the objects of my demented possessiveness. Each momentary misplacement filled me with a frenzied dismay, each item being the tactile reminder of a world soon to be ob...
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.
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...
More or less the same can be said for Art Therapy, which is organized infantilism. Our class was run by a delirious young woman with a fixed, indefatigable smile, who was plainly trained at a school o...
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 a positive and active anguish, a sort of psychical neuralgia wholly unknown to normal life.
In the middle of the journey of our lifeI found myself in a dark wood,For I had lost the right path.
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...
Further, Dr. Gold said with a straight face, the pill at optimum dosage could have the side effect of impotence. Until that moment, although I'd had some trouble with his personality, I had not though...
And when white men in they hate an’ wrath an’ meanness fetches blood from that beautiful black skin then, oh then, my brothers, it is time not fo’ laughing but fo’ weeping an’ rage an’ lamentation! Pr...
And what else did Christianity accomplish? he said. Here’s what Christianity accomplished. Christianity accomplished the mob. The mob. It accomplished not only your senseless butchery, the exterminati...
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...
His disease, whatever it was, resided in shadier corners of his soul—where decisions were reached not through reason but by rationalization, and where a thin membranous growth of selfishness always se...
Writing for me is the hardest thing in the world, but also a thing which, once completed, is the most satisfying. ... I am no prodigy but, Fate willing, I think I can produce art.
When I was first aware that I had been laid low by the disease, I felt a need, among other things, to register a strong protest against the word depression. Depression, most people know, used to be te...
Through some happy accident of heredity he had escaped his father's tediousness, while retaining a little of his mother's jolly high spirits and humor. This did not make him anything special, but at l...