Goddamnit, look! We live here and they live there. We black and they white. They got things and we ain't. They do things and we can't. It's just like livin' in jail.

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

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

Make up your mind, Snail! You are half inside your house, And halfway out!

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 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.