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.

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.

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

Is not life exactly what it ought to be, in a certain sense? Isn't it only the naive who find all of this baffling? If you've a notion of what man's heart is, wouldn't you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man's frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from himself?

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.

I didn't know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for 'em.

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