Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form...without light I am not only invisible but formless as well; and to be unaware of one's form is to live a death...the truth is the light and light is the truth.

For, like almost everyone else in our country, I started out with my share of optimism. I believed in hard work and progress and action, but now, after first being 'for' society and then 'against' it, I assign myself no rank or any limit, and such an attitude is very much against the trend of the times. But my world has become one of infinite possibilities. What a phrase - still it's a good phrase and a good view of life, and a man shouldn't accept any other; that much I've learned underground. Until some gang succeeds in putting the world in a strait jacket, its definition is possibility.

I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.

Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.

In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.

You start Saul, and end up Paul,' my grandfather had often said. 'When you're a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul - though you still Sauls around on the side.

It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.