But, when the chips are down, its better to be furious with someone you love, or frightened for someone you love, than be put through the merciless horror of being ashamed of someone you love.

People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.

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.

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

It is perfectly possible to be enamoured of Paris while remaining totally indifferent or even hostile to the French.

I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it--it, the physical act. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.

To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.