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.

People don't have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you're dead, when they've killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn't have any character. They weep big, bitter tears - not for you. For themselves, because they've lost their toy.

To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced.

After departure, only invisible things are left, perhaps the life of the world is held together by invisible chains of memory and loss and love. So many things, so many people, depart! And we can only repossess them in our minds.

In overlooking, denying, evading this complexity--which is nothing more than the disquieting complexity of ourselves--we are diminished and we perish; only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves. It is this power of revelation that is the business of the novelist, this journey toward a more vast reality which must take precedence over other claims.

You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.