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 ….

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

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

there are times when life's ends are so raveled that reason and sense cry out that we stop and gather them together again before we can proceed.

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 ….

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….

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 ….

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

The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination..

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….

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..

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

It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the ….

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

Each day when you see us black folk upon the dusty land of your farm or upon the hard pavement of your city streets, you usually take it for granted ….

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….