“I went to work, but the mood of the book would not die; it lingered, coloring everything I saw, heard, did. I now felt that I knew what the white man were feeling. Merely because I had read a book ...”

“I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for ...”

“I was persisting in reading my present environment in the light of my old one.”

“...it was no longer a matter of whether I would steal or lie or murder; it was a simple, urgent matter of public pride, a matter of how much I had in common with other people.”

“At the age of twelve, before I had had one full year of formal schooling, I had a conception of life that no experience would ever erase, a predilection for what was real that no argument could eve...”

“Hunger has always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger standing at my bedside, staring at my gauntly.”

“For a long time, they sat without speaking. The air outside was filled with the lilting sound of sparrows, the buzz of traffic on Main Street, and under that the faint lapping of waves on the lakes...”

“If you can't win by reason, go for volume.”

“She meant that they'd never used words like "separation" and "divorce" even in their worst screaming matches. They yelled things like, "You're infuriating!" "You don't think!" "You are the most ann...”

“If you've got the truth you can demonstrate it. Talking doesn't prove it.”

“In all debates, let truth be thy aim, not victory, or an unjust interest.”

“Get what you can with words, because words are free, but the words of an armed man ring that much sweeter.”

“We kill all the caterpillars, then complain there are no butterflies.”

“Where ignorance is our master, there is no possibility of real peace.”

“You can be used by someone for their aims when you are not aware of your true being”