Hatred destroys the person who hates.
Then I buckled up my shoes, and I started.
The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
If you really want to know something about solitude, become famous.
It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak.
It is impossible to pretend that you are not heir to, and therefore, however inadequately or unwillingly, responsible to, and for, the time and place that give you life -- without becoming, at very best, a dangerously disoriented human being.
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.
Rage cannot be hidden, it can only be dissembled. This dissembling deludes the thoughtless, and strengthens rage and adds, to rage, contempt.
I started reading. I read everything I could get my hands on...By the time I was thirteen I had read myself out of Harlem. I had read every book in two libraries and had a card for the Forty-Second Street branch.
It is perfectly possible to be enamoured of Paris while remaining totally indifferent or even hostile to the French.
To hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first . . . acceptance totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are [;] . . . the second . . . that one must never, in one's life, accept . . . injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one's strength.
An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.
I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
Sometimes you hear a person speak the truth and you know that they are speaking the truth. But you also know that they have not heard themselves, do not know what they have said: do not know that they have revealed much more than they have said. This may be why the truth remains, on the whole, so rare.
History is not a procession of illustrious people. It's about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.
Most of us are about as eager to change as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.
When the South has trouble with its Negroes - when the Negroes refuse to remain in their "place" - it blames "outside agitators" and "Northern interference." When the nation has trouble with the Northern Negro, it blames the Kremlin.
Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.
I will no longer take anyone's word for my experience.
If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.
You don't need numbers; you need passion, and this is proven by the history of the world!
America sometimes resembles, at least from the point of view of a black man, an exceedingly monotonous minstrel show; the same dances, same music, same jokes. One has done (or been) the show so long that one can do it in one’s own sleep.
No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.
I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born, in principle, in a society in which they were supposed to be safe. The anomaly of their sexuality puts them in danger, unexpectedly.
All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
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