"Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father's face, for behind your father's face as it is today are all those other faces which were his."

"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."

"Every writer has only one story to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer, until the story becomes at once more narrow and larger, more and more precise, more and more reverberating."

"This world is white no longer and it will never be white again."

"Love forces, at last, this humility: you cannot love if you cannot be loved, you cannot see if you cannot be seen."

"Anyway, I have long had a very definite tendency to tune out the moment I come anywhere near either a pulpit or a soapbox."

"You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discovered it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky."

"I'm not interested in anybody's guilt. Guilt is a luxury that we can no longer afford. I know you didn't do it, and I didn't do it either, but I am responsible for it because I am a man and a citizen of this country and you are responsible for it, too, for the very same reason... Anyone who is trying to be conscious must begin to dismiss the vocabulary which we've used so long to cover it up, to lie about the way things are."

"When he was dead I realized that I had hardly ever spoken to him. When he had been dead a long time I began to wish I had. It seems to be typical of life in America, where opportunities, real and fancied, are thicker than anywhere else on the globe, that the second generation has no time to talk to the first."

"But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power."

"I am very much concerned that American Negroes achieve their freedom here in the United States. But I am also concerned for their dignity, for the health of their souls, and must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them."

"If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him."

"If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go."

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

"To accept one's past -- one's history -- is not the same thing as drowning in it, it is learning how to use it."

"Sin is the only heritage of the natural man..."

"I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter."

"It does seem - well, difficult - to be at the mercy of some gross, unshaven stranger before you can begin to be yourself."

"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 we were eating them as we walked along. We were both insufferably childish and high-spirited that afternoon and the spectacle we presented, two grown men jostling each other on the wide sidewalk and aiming the cherry pits, as though they were spitballs, into each other's faces, must have been outrageous. And I realized that such childishness was fantastic at my age and the happiness out of which it sprang yet more so; for that moment I really loved Giovanni, who had never seemed more beautiful than he was that afternoon."

"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."

"People always seem to band together in accordance to a principle that has nothing to do with love, a principle that releases them from personal responsibility."

"Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance."

"One would never defeat one's circumstances by working and saving one's pennies; one would never, by working, acquire that many pennies, and, besides, the social treatment accorded even the most successful Negroes proved that one needed, in order to be free, something more than a bank account. One needed a handle, a lever, a means of inspiring fear. It was absolutely clear that the police would whip you and take you in as long as they could get away with it, and that everyone else-housewives, taxi-drivers, elevator boys, dishwashers, bartenders, lawyers, judges, doctors, and grocers-would never, by the operation of any generous human feeling, cease to use you as an outlet for his frustrations and hostilities."

"He wanted to go home and lock his door and sleep. He was tired of the troubles of real people. He wanted to get back to the people he was inventing, whose troubles he could bear."

"You know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too early. We cannot be free until they are free."

"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."

"Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be."

"Literature is indispensable to the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks at reality, then you can change it."

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

"And here I was, left with only myself to deal with. It was entirely up to me."

"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."

"Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home."

"There are women who have forgotten that to be a woman doesn't simply mean humiliation, doesn't simply mean bitterness. I haven't forgotten it yet...I'm not going to forget it."

"White Americans find it as difficult as white people elsewhere do to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want. And this assumption-which, for example, makes the solution to the Negro problem depend on the speed with which Negroes accept and adopt white standards-is revealed in all kinds of striking ways, from Bobby Kennedy's assurance that a Negro can become President in forty years to the unfortunate tone of warm congratulation with which so many liberals address their Negro equals."

"We cannot escape our origins, however hard we try, those origins which contain the key -could we but find it- to all we later become."

"Here was the South Side--a million in captivity--stretching from this doorstep as far as the eye could see. And they didn't even read; depressed populations don't have the time or energy to spare. The affluent populations, which should have their help, didn't as far as could be discovered, read, either--they merely bought books and devoured them, but not in order to learn: in order to learn new attitudes."

"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."

"Sometimes, when he was not near me, I thought, I will never let him 'Touch' me again. Then, when he 'Touched' me, I thought, it doesn't matter, it is only the body, it will soon be over. When it was over, I lay in the dark and listened to his breathing and dreamed of the 'Touch' of hands, of Giovanni's hands, or anybody's hands, hands which would have the power to crush me and make me whole again."

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

"You get so used to being hit you find you're always waiting for it. (...) How can I say what it feels like? I don't know. I know everybody's in trouble and nothing is easy, but how can I explain to you what it feels like to be black when I don't understand it and don't want to and spend all my time trying to forget it? I don't want to hate anybody - but now maybe, I can't love anybody either - are we friends? Can we really be friends?"

"A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless."

"They knew that no one heard, that bloodless people cannot be made to bleed. So they blew what everyone had heard before, they reassured everyone that nothing terrible was happening."

"We take our shape it is true within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed."

"Some moments in a life, and they needn't be very long or seem very important, can make up for so much in that life; can redeem, justify, that pain, that bewilderment, with which one lives, and invest one with the courage not only to endure it, but to profit from it; some moments teach one the price of human connection: if one can live with one's own pain, then one respects the pain of others, and so, briefly, but transcendentally, we can release each other from pain."

"This was not as real as my despairing sense that nothing was real for me, nothing would ever be real for me again " unless, indeed, this sensation of falling was reality."

"The world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare."

"I know that people can be better than they are. We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is."

"Tell me, he said, "What is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are always saying, we must wait, we must wait. what are they waiting for?""Well. I guess people wait in order to make sure of what they feel.""And when you have waited--has it made you sure?"

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

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