Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.

Love grows from stable relationships, shared experience, loyalty, devotion, trust.

We had our own civilization in Africa before we were captured and carried off to this land. We smelted iron, danced, made music and folk poems; we sculpted, worked in glass, spun cotton and wool, wove baskets and cloth. We invented a medium of exchange, mined silver and gold, made pottery and cutlery, we fashioned tools and utensils of brass, bronze, ivory, quartz, and granite. We had our own literature, our own systems of law, religion, medicine, science, and education.

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

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 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.

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.