He had power over her not because she was free but because she was guilty. To enforce his power over her he had only to keep her guilt awake.
His touch, which should have raised her, lifted her roughly only to throw her down hard; whenever he touched her, she became blacker and dirtier than ever; the loneliest place under heaven was in Paul’s arms.
One had to make one’s way carefully here, for all these people were blind.
There were lots of people around us, but I still felt this terrible lack of friendliness.
I was the synchronizer of the watches.
But it would make him bitter, it would make her ashamed, for him to see how she was letting herself be wasted – for Paul, who did not love her.
Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we – and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others – do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.
Well, the black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations. You, don’t be afraid.
Perhaps he had supposed that my growing up would bring us closer together – whereas, now that he was trying to find out something about me, I was in full flight from him. I did not want him to know me. I did not want anyone to know me.
The love and the laughter come from the same place: but not many people go there.
It is very frightening to belong to somebody.
This has everything to do, of course, with the nature of that dream and with the fact that we Americans, of whatever color, do not dare examine it and are far from having made it a reality.
I sometimes think, with despair, that Americans will swallow whole any political speech whatever – we’ve been doing very little else, these last, bad years.
But the aims of life are antithetical to those of the dreamer, and the teeth of the world are sharp.
Look, men have been sleeping with men for thousands of years – and raising tribes. This is a Western sickness, it really is. It’s an artificial division. Men will be sleeping with each other when the trumpet sounds. It’s only this infantile culture which has made such a big deal of it.
For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become.
It is one thing to overthrow a dictator or to repel and invader and quite another thing really to achieve a revolution.
That’s what the Blues and Spirituals are all about. It is the ability to look on things as they are and survive your losses, or even not survive them – to know that your losses are coming. To know they are coming is the only possible insurance you have, a faint insurance, that you will survive them.
Fonny liked me so much that it didn’t occur to him that he loved me. I liked him so much that no other boy was real to me. I didn’t see them. I didn’t know what this meant. But the waiting moment, which had spied us on the road, and which was waiting for us, knew.
I said before that America’s effort to avoid the presence of black people constricts American literature. It creates a trap white writers find themselves in.