A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.

If the word 'integration' means anything, this is what it means that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.

Then I buckled up my shoes, and I started.

It is perfectly possible to be enamoured of Paris while remaining totally indifferent or even hostile to the French.

It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death-- ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.

She was twenty and had come to realize that, though she had a voice, she wasn't a singer; that to endure and embrace the life of a singer demands a whole lot more than a voice.

The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through.