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.

The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.

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

The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.

No one knows very much about the life of another. This ignorance becomes vivid, if you love another. Love sets the imagination on fire, and, also, eventually, chars the imagination into a harder element: imagination cannot match love, cannot plunge so deep, or range so wide.