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.

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.

Violence is a personal necessity for the oppressed...It is not a strategy consciously devised. It is the deep, instinctive expression of a human being denied individuality.

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.

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.