Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.
I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.
There is no way of conveying to the corpse the reasons you have made him one – you have the corpse, and you are, thereafter, at themercy of a fact which missed the truth, which means that the corpse has you.
All racists are irresponsible.
At bottom, to be colored means that one has been caught in some utterly unbelievable cosmic joke, a joke so hideous and in such bad taste that it defeats all categories and definitions.
A liberal: someone who thinks he knows more about your experience than you do.
One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.
One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.
To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.
I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read. The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy, and we can dismiss it with the restrained observation that I certainly would not consider living it again.
The betrayal of a belief is not the same thing as ceasing to believe. If this were not so there would be no moral standards in the world at all.
Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.
You don’t realize that you’re intelligent until it gets you into trouble.
When the book comes out it may hurt you – but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face about myself.
The world tends to trap you in the role you play and it is always extremely hard to maintain a watchful, mocking distance between oneself as one appears to be and oneself as one actually is.
When the South has trouble with its Negroes when the Negroes refuse to remain in their “place” it blames “outside agitators” and “Northern interference.” When the nation has trouble with the Northern Negro, it blames the Kremlin.
An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger.
Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.
I am aware that no man is a villain in his own eyes.
I’m beginning to think that maybe everything that happens makes sense. Like, if it didn’t make sense, how could it happen?