192 quotes found
“Whose little boy are you?”
“I don’t know any writers who don’t drink.”
“I do a lot of rewriting. Its very painful.”
“We live in a nation of pigs and murderers.”
“I do a lot of rewriting. It’s very painful.”
“Whoever debases others is debasing himself.”
“Ain't no such thing as a little fault or a big fault. Satan get his foot in the door, he ain't going to rest till he's in the room. You is in the Word or you ain't--ain't no halfway with God.”
“...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...”
“...when the black populations of the world have a future, so will the Western nations have a future-and not till then. But the terrible probability is that the Western populations, struggling to ho...”
“I had been sent away to help guarantee and perpetuate this indifference. No one, here, knew what was happening anywhere else. Perhaps no one ever knows that, anywhere: wherever "here" may be, it mu...”
“You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.”
“The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.”
“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 ...”
“One of the things, though, that has always afflicted the American reality and the American vision is this aversion to history. History is not something you read about in a book, history is not even...”
“I don't give a damn if there's any hope for them or not. But I know that I am not about to be bugged by any more white jokers who still can't figure out whether I'm human or not. If they don't know...”
“And here I was, left with only myself to deal with. It was entirely up to me.”
“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. (p. 81)”
“That the world calls morality is nothing but the dream of safety. That's how the world gets to be so fucking moral. The only way to know that you are safe is to see somebody else in danger-otherwis...”
“The power to define the other seals one's definition of oneself.”
“My father's attitude was that this was but an inevitable phase of my growing up and he affected to take it lightly. But beneath his jocular, boys-together air, he was at a loss, he was frightened. ...”
“[I am] someone who represents a very complex country which insists on being simple-minded. And simplicity, it occurs to me, it has occurred to me more than once, in my somewhat stormy life, simplic...”
“But the conquest of the physical world is not mans only duty. He is also enjoined to conquer the great wilderness of himself. The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, b...”
“Sin is the only heritage of the natural man...”
“The real reason that nonviolence is considered to be a virtue in Negroes I am not speaking now of its racial value, another matter altogether is that white men do not want their lives, their self-i...”
“...they ain't never met nobody they didn't lie to and steal from.”
