It is dangerous to be an American Negro male. America has never wanted its Negroes to be men, and does not, generally, treat them as men. It treats them as mascots, pets, or things.

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state on innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.

An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.

Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.

The world tends to trap you in the role you play and it is always extremely hard to maintain a watchful, mocking distance between oneself as one appears to be and oneself as one actually is.