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

The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.

Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.

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 started reading. I read everything I could get my hands on...By the time I was thirteen I had read myself out of Harlem. I had read every book in two libraries and had a card for the Forty-Second Street branch.

Somebody," said Jacques, "your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour - and in the oddest places! - for the lack of it.

I am certainly convinced that it is one of the greatest impulses of mankind to arrive at something higher than a natural state.