I did not want him to know me. I did not want anyone to know me.
We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.
They must continue to produce things they do not really admire, still less love, in order to continue buying things they do not really want, still less need.
I never wish to make love again with anything more than the body.
The white racist has ruled the world for a long time, and the crises we are undergoing now are involved with the fact that the habits of power are not only extremely hard to lose; they are as tenacious as some incurable disease.
Why would I want to poison you? Then I have no job and I have only just found out that I want to live.
The principles were Blindness, Loneliness, and Terror, the first principle necessarily and actively cultivated in order to deny the two others. I would love to believe that the principles were Faith, Hope, and Charity, but this is clearly not so for most Christians, or for what we call the Christian world.
The author “must destroy our myths and give us back our histories, which will destroy our attitudes and give us back our personalities.
We cannot be free until they are free.
I wanted children. I wanted to be inside again, with the light and safety, with my manhood unquestioned, watching my woman put my children to bed. I wanted the same bed at night and the same arms and I wanted to rise in the morning, knowing where I was. I wanted a woman to be for me a steady ground, like the earth itself, where I could always be renewed.
Whatever the Europeans may actually think of artists, they have killed enough of them off by now to know that they are as real-and as persistent- as rain, snow, taxes or businessmen.
Furthermore, those beneath the Western heel, unlike those within the West, are aware that Germany’s current role in Europe is to act as a bulwark against the “uncivilized” hordes, and since power is what the powerless want, they understand very well what we of the West want to keep, and are not deluded by our talk of a freedom that we have never been willing to share with them.
The crowd seemed to swallow this theology with no effort – all crowds do swallow theology this way, I gather, in both sides of Jerusalem, in Istanbul, and in Rome – and, as theology goes, it was no more indigestible than the more familiar brand asserting that there is a curse on the sons of Ham. No more, and no less, and it had been designed for the same purpose; namely, the sanctification of power.
She danced out into the aisle, beautiful with a beauty unbearable, graceful with grace that poured from heaven.
I have not thought of that boy – Joey – for many years; but I see him quite clearly tonight. It was several years ago. I was still in my teens, he was about my age, give or take a year. He was a very nice boy, too, very quick and dark, and always laughing. For a while he was my best friend. Later, the idea that such a person could have been my best friend was proof of some horrifying taint in me. So I forgot him. But I see him very well tonight.
To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity. Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame.
All doormen, for example, and policemen have by now, for me, become the exactly same, and my style with them is designed simply to intimidate them before they can intimidate me. No doubt I’m guilty of some injustice here, but it is irreducible since I cannot risk assuming that the humanity of these people is more real to them than their uniforms.
Here was the South Side – a million in captivity – stretching from this doorstep as far as the eye could see. And they didn’t even read; depressed populations don’t have the time or energy to spare.
We’re going to sit down somewhere until this rush hour’s over. You and me, we’ve got to talk anyway, before we talk to Mama and Daddy. They don’t know yet. I haven’t talked to them yet.” And I realize how much Ernestine loves me, at the same time that I remember that she is, after all, only four years older than I.
All you are ever told in this country about being black is that it is a terrible, terrible thing to be. Now, in order to survive this, you have to really dig down into yourself and re-create yourself, really, according to no image which yet exists in America. You have to impose, in fact – this may sound very strange – you have to decide who you are, and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.