In the invincible and indescribable squalor of Harlem ... I was tormented. I felt caged, like an animal. I wanted to escape. I felt if I did not get out I would slowly strangle.

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.

I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it--it, the physical act. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.

Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it.

Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.

... every human being is an unprecedented miracle.

An American Negro, however deep his sympathies, or however bright his rage, ceases to be simply a black man when he faces a black man from Africa.