Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.
Allegiance, after all, has to work two ways; and one can grow weary of an allegiance which is not reciprocal.
Because I was raised in a Christian culture I never considered myself to be a totally free human being.
If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.
And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.
The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated – in the main, abominably – because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.
American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.
Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?
Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity.
No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.
People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.
Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.
If you’re afraid to die, you will not be able to live.
The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.