I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all.
I listened, vaguely knowing now that I had committed some awful wrong that I could not undo, that I had uttered words I could not recall even though I ached to nullify them, kill them, turn back time to the moment before I had talked so that I could have another chance to save myself.
Goddamnit, look! We live here and they live there. We black and they white. They got things and we ain’t. They do things and we can’t. It’s just like livin’ in jail.
The white folks like for us to be religious, then they can do what they want to with us.
You asked me questions nobody ever asked me before. You knew that I was a murderer two times over, but you treated me like a man...
The thing to do was to act just like others acted, live like they lived, and while they were not looking, do what you wanted.
Literature is a struggle over the nature of reality.
Held at bay by the hate of others, preoccupied with his own feelings, he was continuously at war with reality.
Having been thrust out of the world because of my race, I had accepted my destiny by not being curious about what shaped it.
Men are inventing ideas every day to justify for themselves and others their actions and needs.
Cross felt that at the heart of all political movements the concept of the basic inequality of man was enthroned and practiced, and the skill of politicians consisted in how cleverly they hid this elementary truth and gained votes by pretending the contrary.
Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.
Don’t leave inferences to be drawn when evidence can be presented.
Love grows from stable relationships, shared experience, loyalty, devotion, trust.
Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books...
Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.
I was not leaving the south to forget the south, but so that some day I might understand it.
They hate because they fear, and they fear because they feel that the deepest feelings of their lives are being assaulted and outraged. And they do not know why; they are powerless pawns in a blind play of social forces.
It had been only through books-at best, no more than vicarious cultural transfusions-that I had managaed to keep myself alive in a negatively vital way. Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books...
Hunger has always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger standing at my bedside, staring at my gauntly.