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….

We had our own civilization in Africa before we were captured and carried off to this land. We smelted iron, danced, made music and folk poems; we sc….

Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and ba….

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 n….

Pity can purge us of hostility and arouse feelings of identification with the characters, but it can also be a consoling reassurance which leads us t….

Anything seemed possible, likely, feasible, because I wanted everything to be possible... Because I had no power to make things happen outside of me ….

I didn't know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for 'em..

Love grows from stable relationships, shared experience, loyalty, devotion, trust..

What could I dream of that had the barest possibility of coming true? I could think of nothing. And, slowly, it was upon exactly that nothingness tha….

Don't leave inferences to be drawn when evidence can be presented..

Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread..

Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days..

I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt that I had to go somewhere and do some….

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 ….

At the age of twelve I had an attitude toward life that was to endure, that was to make me seek those areas of living that would keep it alive, that ….

Violence is a personal necessity for the oppressed...It is not a strategy consciously devised. It is the deep, instinctive expression of a human bein….

It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than a sense of life itself..

If a man confessed anything on his death bed, it was the truth; for no man could stare death in the face and lie..

He had lived and acted on the assumption that he was alone, and now he saw that he had not been. What he had done made others suffer. No matter how m….

In me was shaping a yearning for a kind of consciousness, a mode of being that the way of life about me had said could not be, must not be, and upon ….

Make up your mind, Snail! You are half inside your house, And halfway out!.