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.

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.

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

There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.

Whatever you describe to another person is also a revelation of who you are and who you think you are. You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.

Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.

For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.