To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.

Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.

The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through. Most people had not lived -- nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died-- through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain. The great question that faced him this morning was whether or not had had ever, really, been present at his life.

There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation.

When the white man came to Africa, the white man had the Bible and the African had the land, but now it is the white man who is being, reluctantly and bloodily, separated from the land, and the African who is still attempting to digest or to vomit up the Bible.

To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.

You write in order to change the world.