What could I dream of that had the barest possibility of coming true? I could think of nothing. And, slowly, it was upon exactly that nothingness that my mind began to dwell, that constant sense of wanting without having, of being hated without reason.

Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness

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

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

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

It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.

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