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

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.

The more closely the author thinks of why he wrote, the more he comes to regard his imagination as a kind of self-generating cement which glued his facts together, and his emotions as a kind of dark and obscure designer of those facts. Reluctantly, he comes to the conclusion that to account for his book is to account for his life.

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

Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.

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