But what a feeling can come over a man just from seeing the things he believes in and hopes for symbolized in the concrete form of a man. In something that gives a focus to...

I could hardly get to sleep for dreaming of revenge.

So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down? Because in spite of myself I’ve learned some things. Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled “file and forget,” and...

God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.

Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.

The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.

When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.

leaders” without followers; old men of sixty or more still caught up in post-Civil War dreams of freedom within segregation; the pathetic ones who possessed noting beyond their dreams of being gentlemen, who held small...

And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.

It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too,...

Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn’t now, I couldn’t give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before...

Can it be, I thought, can it actually be? …….could he be all of them: Rine the runner and Rine the gambler and Rine the briber and Rine the lover and Rinehart the Reverend? Could...

I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.

Negro” societies are in full possession of the world’s knowledge and in control of their destinies, they will bring to an end all those savageries which for centuries have been committed in the name of...

So now they’re shaking in their boots and looking for someone to give them the answer they want to hear. Not the truth, but some lie that will protect them from the truth

I was no longer afraid. Not of important men, not of trustees and such; for knowing now that there was nothing which I could expect from them, there was no reason to be afraid.

What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do? What a waste, what a senseless waste! But what...

Words of Emancipation didn’t arrive until the middle of June so they called it Juneteenth. So that was it, the night of Juneteenth celebration, his mind went on. The celebration of a gaudy illusion.

I’d been so fascinated by the notion, that I’d forgotten to measure what it was bringing forth. I’d been asleep, dreaming.

Maybe it’s just that some of us have had certain facts and truths slapped up against our heads so hard and so often that we have to see them and pay our respects to their...

And all Negroes at some period of their lives there is that yearning for a sense of group unity that is the yearning of men for a flag: for a unity that cannot be compromised,...

Peonage, Anti-Lynch Bill, poll tax, these are our issues. They are the most controversial issues in American life, and some of us will have to die for them! Yes, we want to join with the...

Everywhere I’ve turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?

Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.

Literature is integrated, and I’m not just talking about color or race. I’m talking about the power of literature to make us recognize – and again and again – the wholeness of the human experience.

Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.

I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I’ve tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied

Yes, they think we’re dumb. They call us the “common people.” But I’ve been sitting here listening and looking and trying to understand what’s so common about us. I think they’re guilty of a gross...

All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was.