I often wonder what I'd do if there weren't any books in the world.

... every human being is an unprecedented miracle.

He leaned up a little and watched her face. Her face would now be, forever, more mysterious and impenetrable than the face of any stranger. Strangers' faces hold no secrets because the imagination does not invest them with any. But the face of a lover is an unknown precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.

I think that the inability to love is the central problem, because that inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And if you can't be touched, you can't be changed. And if you can't be changed, you can't be alive.

Most people... find a disorientating mismatch between the long-term nature of their liabilities and the increasingly short-term nature of their assets.

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.

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