The truth is the light and the light is the truth.

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

...and yet I am what they think I am.

Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.

The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.

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