It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.

Hunger has always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger standing at my bedside, staring at my gauntly.

Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.

Each day when you see us black folk upon the dusty land of your farm or upon the hard pavement of your city streets, you usually take it for granted and think you know us, but our history is far stranger than you suspect, and we are not what we seem.

It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than a sense of life itself.

Anything seemed possible, likely, feasible, because I wanted everything to be possible... Because I had no power to make things happen outside of me in the objective world, I made things happen within. Because my environment was bare and bleak, I endowed it with unlimited potentialities, redeemed it for the sake of my own hungry and cloudy yearning.

Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.