People can cry much easier than they can change, a rule of psychology people like me picked up as kids on the street.

God be thanked for books! They are the voices of the distant and the dead.

The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through. Most people had not lived -- nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died-- through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain. The great question that faced him this morning was whether or not had had ever, really, been present at his life.

I was guilty and irritated and full of love and pain. I wanted to kick him and I wanted to take him in my arms.

People who have been wronged will attempt to right the wrong; they would not be people if they didn't. They can rarely afford to be scrupulous about the means they will use. They will use such means as come to hand. Neither, in the main, will they distinguish one oppressor from another, nor see through to the root principle of their oppression.

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

The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through.