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

Don't leave inferences to be drawn when evidence can be presented.

there are times when life's ends are so raveled that reason and sense cry out that we stop and gather them together again before we can proceed

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.

Anything seemed possible, likely, feasible, because I wanted everything to be possible... Because I had no power to make things happen outside of me in the objective world, I made things happen within. Because my environment was bare and bleak, I endowed it with unlimited potentialities, redeemed it for the sake of my own hungry and cloudy yearning.

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

All literature is protest.