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.

He had lived and acted on the assumption that he was alone, and now he saw that he had not been. What he had done made others suffer. No matter how much he would long for them to forget him, they would not be able to. His family was a part of him, not only in blood, but in spirit.

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

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

It had been only through books-at best, no more than vicarious cultural transfusions-that I had managaed to keep myself alive in a negatively vital way. Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.

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.