If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you'll never make it.

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always be seen as untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of Success.

It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be.

Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.

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