I’m going to pray God,” said John – and his voice shook, whether with joy or grief he could not say – “to keep me, and make me strong... to stand... to stand against the enemy... and against everything and everybody... that wants to cut down my soul.
In benighted, incompetent Africa, I had never encountered an orphan: the American streets resembled nothing so much as one vast, howling, unprecedented orphanage. It has been vivid to me for many years that what we call a race problem here is not a race problem at all: to keep calling it that is a way of avoiding the problem. The problem is rooted in the question of how one treats one’s flesh and blood, especially one’s children.
He held my face between his hands and I suppose such tenderness has scarcely ever produced such terror as I then felt. ‘Ne me laisse pas tomber, je t’en prie,’ he said, and kissed me, with strange insistent gentleness on the mouth.
This is why the most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose. You do not need ten such men – one will do.
You do, sometimes, remind of the kind of man who is tempted to put himself in prison in order to avoid being hit by a car.
We human beings now have the power to exterminate ourselves; this seems to be the entire sum of our achievement.
I’m going to have my baby and I’m going to bring him up to be a man. And I ain’t going to read to him out of no Bibles and I ain’t going to take him to hear no preaching. If he don’t drink nothing but moonshine all his natural days he be a better man than his Daddy.
I walked over to her and put my head on her breast. I wanted to lie there, hidden and still.
You’ve come full circle. Here you are again, with it all to do all over again, and you must decide all over again whether you want to be famous or whether you want to write. And the two things, in spite of all the evidence, have nothing whatever in common.
It is not permissible that the authors of devastation should be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.
I’ve begun this letter five times and torn it up five times.
Well,′ she said, ‘you may not be a stranger now. But you were once and I’m sure you will be again – many times.
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. The affluent populations, which should have been their help, didn’t, as far as could be discovered, read, either – they merely bought books and devoured them, but not in order to learn: in order to learn new attitudes.
I am nothing to you, nothing, and you bring me fever but no delight.
At length, she lay beside him like a burden laid down at evening which must be picked up once more in the morning.
The Lord had given her what she said she wanted, as was often, she had found, His bewildering method of answering prayer.
I don’t know, I’m just my mother’s son. Sometimes that’s all that makes the difference between us and them.
America, of all the Western nations, has been best placed to prove the uselessness and the obsolescence of the concept of color. But it has not dated to accept this opportunity, or even to conceive of it as an opportunity.
There seemed to be more chatter – in that curiously measured and vehement language, which sometimes reminds me of stiffening egg white and sometimes of stringed instruments but always of the underside and aftermath of passion.
Es un milagro darnos cuenta de que alguien nos quiere.