It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.

Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to...

It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.

There is never a time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now.

It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death– ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life:...

Only a man can see in the face of a woman the girl she was. It is a secret which can be revealed only to a particular man, and, then, only at his insistence. But...

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.

A real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things that can be named.

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

I had never before thought of how awful the relationship must be between the musician and his instrument. He has to fill it, this instrument, with the breath of life, his own. He has to...

We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.

You don’t know how much I needed to hear from you. I wanted to write you many a time but I dug how much I must have hurt you and so I didn’t write. But...

Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore

The summer ended. Day by day, and taking its time, the summer ended. The noises in the street began to change, diminish, voices became fewer, the music sparse. Daily, blocks and blocks of children were...

I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it–it, the physical act.I simply...

And this was perhaps the first time in my life that death occurred to me as a reality. I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to...

If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they’re real for you whether they’re real or not.

This past, this endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity, human authority, yet contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful. I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering –...

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very...

Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.

There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.

Beneath the face of anyone you ever loved for true – anyone you love, you will always love, love is not at the mercy of time and it does not recognize death, they are strangers...

If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my...

If I could make you stay, I would,’ he shouted. ‘If I had to beat you, chain you, starve you—if I could make you stay, I would.’ He turned back into the room; the wind...

Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of...

White Americans have contented themselves with gestures that are now described as “tokenism”. For hard example, white Americans congratulate themselves on the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in the schools; they suppose, in spite...

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.

The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked...

It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.

The way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.

Elisha,’ he said, ‘no matter what happens to me, where I go, what folks say about me, no matter what anybody says, you remember – please remember – I was saved. I was there.

They have never put it into words, they cannot; but each absence is a threat. They never felt this way in New York – they moved all over New York. Here each is afraid that...

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags,...

Love him,’ said Jacques, with vehemence, ‘love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters? And how long, at the best, can it last, since you are both...

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.

Whether in private debate or in public, any attempt I made to explain how the Black Muslim movement came about, and how it has achieved such force, was met with a blankness that revealed the...

The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.

But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking on the road; the perspective to say the very...

All that hatred down there,” he said, “all that hatred and misery and love. It’s a wonder it doesn’t blow the avenue apart.

Perhaps he is a fool or a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.

You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.

Whose little boy are you?

I may be drunk by morning but that will not do any good. I shall take the train to Paris anyway. The train will be the same, the people, struggling for comfort and, even, dignity...

It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.

Giovanni had awakened an itch, had released a gnaw in me. I realized it one afternoon, when I was taking him to work via the Boulevard Montparnasse. We had bought a kilo of cherries and...

There is an illusion about America, a myth about America to which we are clinging which has nothing to do with the lives we lead and I don’t believe that anybody in this country who...