People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.

It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be.

People are continually pointing out to me the wretchedness of white people in order to console me for the wretchedness of blacks. But an itemized account of the American failure does not console me and it should not console anyone else. That hundreds of thousands of white people are living, in effect, no better than the "niggers" is not a fact to be regarded with complacency. The social and moral bankruptcy suggested by this fact is of the bitterest, most terrifying kind.

When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.

If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.