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

Yr crown has been bought and paid for. All you have to do is put it on yr head

All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.

Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.

The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.

If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you'll never make it.