The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.

It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own: in the face of one's victim, one sees oneself.

In order to have a conversation with someone you must reveal yourself.

The American idea of racial progress is measured by how fast I become white.

There exists among the intolerable degraded, the perverse and powerful desire to force into the arena of the actual those fantastic crimes of which they have been accused, achieving their vengeance and their own destruction through making the nightmare real.

I don't know, now, when I first looked at Hella and found her stale, found her body uninteresting, her presence grating. It seemed to happen all at once—I suppose that only means that it had been happening for a long time.

The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.