Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.

The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them.

Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak?

When we see life, we call it beautiful. When we see death, we call it ugly. But it is more beautiful still to see oneself living at great speed, right up to the moment of death.

Betrayal is beautiful.

Limited by the world, which I oppose, jagged by it, I shall be all the more handsome and sparkling as the angles which wound me and give me shape are more acute and the jagging more cruel.

What I did not yet know so intensely was the hatred of the white American for the black, a hatred so deep that I wonder if every white man in this country, when he plants a tree, doesn't see Negroes hanging from its branches.