"I told myself all sorts of lies, standing there at the bar, but I could not move. And this was partly because I knew that it did not really matter anymore; it did not even matter if I never spoke to Giovanni again; for they had become visible, as visible as the wafers on the shirt of the flaming princess, they stormed all over me, my awakening, my insistent possibilities."

"People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted."

"That summer, in any case, all the fears with which I had grown up, and which were now a part of me and controlled my vision of the world, rose up like a wall between the world and me, and drove me into the church."

"The question of identity is a question involving the most profound panic-a terror as primary as the nightmare of the mortal fall."

"Most people in action are not worth very much and yet every human being is an unprecedented miracle."

"The Constitution gives you the right, as a white man, to have a rifle in your home. The Constitution gives you the right to protect yourself. Why is it 'ominous' when black people even talk of having rifles? Why don't we have the right to self-defense? Is it because maybe you know we're going to have to defend ourselves against you?"

"An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience."

"She fitted in my arms, she always had, and the shock of holding her caused me to feel that my arms had been empty since she had been away."