This is the charged, the dangerous moment, when everything must be re-examined, must be made new, when nothing at all can be taken for granted.

These boys, now, were living as we'd been living then, they were growing up with a rush and their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities. They were filled with rage. All they really knew were two darknesses, the darkness of their lives, which were now closing in on them, and the darkness of the movies, which had blinded them to that other darkness, and in which they now, vindictively, dreamed, at once more together than they were at any other time, and more alone.

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.

It is dangerous to be an American Negro male. America has never wanted its Negroes to be men, and does not, generally, treat them as men. It treats them as mascots, pets, or things.

You go into a book and you're in the dark, really. You go in with a certain fear and trembling. You know one thing. You know you will not be the same person when this voyage is over. But you don't know what's going to happen to you between getting on the boat and stepping off.

We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.

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