Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

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.

Negro servants have been smuggling odds and ends out of white homes for generations, and white people have been delighted to have them do it, because it has assuaged a dim guilt and testified to the intrinsic superiority of white people.

Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.

Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.

I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.

People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.