Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.

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

And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

I must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them. . . . I know the spiritual wasteland to which that road leads . . . whoever debases others is debasing himself.

Negro servants have been smuggling odds and ends out of white homes for generations, and white people have been delighted to have them do it, because it has assuaged a dim guilt and testified to the intrinsic superiority of white people.

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.