The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat..

After departure, only invisible things are left, perhaps the life of the world is held together by invisible chains of memory and loss and love. So m….

The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now..

It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that t….

In order for this to happen, your entire frame of reference will have to change, and you will be forced to surrender many things that you now scarcel….

I think that the inability to love is the central problem, because that inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touc….

All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand; and the wonder is not that so m….

People who cling to their illusions find it difficult, if not impossible, to learn anything worth learning: a people under the necessity of creating ….

The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in..

The future is like heaven-everyone exalts it but no one wants to go there now..

Each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other - male in female, female in male, white in black, and black in white. We are part of each othe….

If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you're not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you. What you ….

One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet ….

The American ideal of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This idea has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and b….

The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever..

The states of birth, suffering, love, and death, are extreme states: extreme, universal, and inescapable. We all know this, but we would rather not k….

If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainb….

The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him..

When human rights are abused on a grand scale, the broth of purity boils and feeds the rebellion of a new order..

The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through. Most people had not lived -- nor could it, for tha….

The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated..