I started reading. I read everything I could get my hands on...By the time I was thirteen I had read myself out of Harlem. I had read every book in two libraries and had a card for the Forty-Second Street branch.

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

And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time, and furthermore, to win.

People who cling to their illusions find it difficult, if not impossible, to learn anything worth learning: a people under the necessity of creating themselves must examine everything, and soak up learning the way the roots of a tree soak up water.

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.

History is not a procession of illustrious people. It's about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.

Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.