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

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.

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.

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.

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

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?