You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.

All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand; and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.

If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, fire next time.

There is something terribly radical about believing that one's own experience and images are important enough to speak about, much less to write about and to perform

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.