What I had begun to discover is that, mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from normal experience, the grey drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain. B...
We each devise our means of escape from the intolerable.
To make matters worse, I was out of a job and had very little money and was self-exiled to Flatbush—like others of my countrymen, another lean and lonesome Southerner wandering amid the Kingdom of the...
They had begun just lately—rumors about the Loftises, rumors about another woman, whisperings which disturbed him not so much because they concerned the Loftises—whom he didn’t know too well, in any c...
There was a time, he said softly, when I thought I’d found some kind of answer. God, we go through life fooling ourselves, thinking we’ve got the answer, only it’s never the answer really. I thought t...
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.
The query: At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God? And the answer: Where was man?
The most futile thing a man can do is to ponder the alternatives, to stew and fret over the life that might have been lived if circumstances had not pointed his future in a certain direction.
The danger is especially apparent if the young person is affected by what has been termed incomplete mourning—has, in effect, been unable to achieve the catharsis of grief, and so carries within himse...
Tamtej jesieni, kiedy mój organizm stopniowo ulegał coraz większemu rozregulowaniu, zacząłem rozumieć, że mój umysł jest jak archaiczna ręczna centrala telefoniczna w małym miasteczku zalewana stopnio...
Somehow I still could not believe that this life we all have together would ever be changed.
She was determined to put behind her the madness of the past—or as much as a vulnerable and memory-racked mind permitted—
My mother, alone among all the Negroes at Turner’s Mill, had been laid honorably to rest in the family plot among white folks (scant yards away, indeed, from the unsentimental Benjamin, now spinning i...
I thought there's something to be said for honor in this world where there doesn't seem to be any honor left. I thought that maybe happiness wasn't really anything more than the knowledge of a life we...
I don’t see any point in trying to equate one evil with another, or to assign some stupid scale of values. They’re both awful! Would
But I could tell from the way his muscles become stiff and this trembling that ran through him that he was finished with me. Even so I couldn’t stop.
Aushwitze itself remains explicable. The most profound statement yet made upon Aushwitz was not a statement at all, but a response. The query, 'At Aushwitze, tell me, where was God?'And the answer: 'W...
Maybe that’s the key to happiness—being sort of dumb, not wanting to know any of the answers.
I came to absorb the history of the Virginia Tidewater—that primordial American demesne where the land was sucked dry by tobacco, laid waste and destroyed a whole century before golden California beca...
But oh, my brothers, black folk ain’t never goin’ to be led from bondage without they has pride! Black folk ain’t goin’ to be free, they ain’t goin’ to have no spoonbread an’ sweet cider less’n they s...