Yet I also suspected that what I was seeing was but a part of the truth and perhaps not even the most important part; beneath these faces, these clothes, accents, rudenesses, was power and sorrow, both unadmitted, unrealized, the power of inventors, the sorrow of the disconnected.

The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.

It happened, as many things do, imperceptibly, in many ways at once. I date it - the slow crumbling of my faith, the pulverization of my fortress - from the time, about a year after I had begun to preach, when I began to read again. I justified this desire by the fact that I was still in school, and I began, fatally, with Dostoyevsky.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

The moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.

The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide.