It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.

People can cry much easier than they can change.

Not only was I not born to be a slave; I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave master.

The determination to outwit one's situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.

Passion is not friendly. It is arrogant, superbly contemptuous of all that is not itself, and, as they very definition of passion implies the impulse to freedom, it has a might intimidiating power. It contains a challenge. It contains an unspeakable hope.

The future is like heaven-everyone exalts it but no one wants to go there now.

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.