There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation.

The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through.

The past is what makes the present coherent, and the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.

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

It seems to be typical of life in America ... that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.

There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.

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.