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.

But the color of a Negro's skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target

I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt that I had to go somewhere and do something to redeem my being alive.

Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.

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

I could endure the hunger. I had learned to live with hate. But to feel that there was feeling denied me, that the very breath of life itself was beyond my reach, that more than anything else hurt, wounded me. I had a new hunger.

I was not leaving the south to forget the south, but so that some day I might understand it