It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.

You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.

Not only was I not born to be a slave; I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave master.

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.

I am certainly convinced that it is one of the greatest impulses of mankind to arrive at something higher than a natural state.

I was in his hands, he called me by the thunder at my ear. I was in his hands: I was being changed; all that I could do was cling to him. I did not realize, until I realized it, that I was also kissing him, that everything was breaking and changing and turning in me and moving toward him.