Rage cannot be hidden, it can only be dissembled. This dissembling deludes the thoughtless, and strengthens rage and adds, to rage, contempt.
I started reading. I read everything I could get my hands on...By the time I was thirteen I had read myself out of Harlem. I had read every book in two libraries and had a card for the Forty-Second Street branch.
It is perfectly possible to be enamoured of Paris while remaining totally indifferent or even hostile to the French.
Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle.
Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.
There exists among the intolerable degraded, the perverse and powerful desire to force into the arena of the actual those fantastic crimes of which they have been accused, achieving their vengeance and their own destruction through making the nightmare real.
An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.
I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
History is not a procession of illustrious people. It's about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.
Most of us are about as eager to change as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.
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.
Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.
I will no longer take anyone's word for my experience.
If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.
Sometimes you hear a person speak the truth and you know that they are speaking the truth. But you also know that they have not heard themselves, do not know what they have said: do not know that they have revealed much more than they have said. This may be why the truth remains, on the whole, so rare.
America sometimes resembles, at least from the point of view of a black man, an exceedingly monotonous minstrel show; the same dances, same music, same jokes. One has done (or been) the show so long that one can do it in one’s own sleep.
You don't need numbers; you need passion, and this is proven by the history of the world!
No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.
I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born, in principle, in a society in which they were supposed to be safe. The anomaly of their sexuality puts them in danger, unexpectedly.
All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.
After my best friend jumped off the bridge, I knew that I was next. So-Paris. With forty dollars and a one-way ticket.
I often wonder what I'd do if there weren't any books in the world.
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 hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first . . . acceptance totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are [;] . . . the second . . . that one must never, in one's life, accept . . . injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one's strength.
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