If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up.

There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race - scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct... it has a social function, racism.

Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.

Movements toward freedom and the self-respect that comes from something other than what people think is their most important feature.

When she awoke there was a melody in her head she could not identify or recall ever hearing before. 'Perhaps I made it up,' she thought. Then it came to her - the name of the song and all its lyrics just as she had heard it many times before. She sat on the edge of the bed thinking, 'There aren't any more new songs and I have sung all the ones there are. I have sung them all. I have sung all the songs there are.

I lived in a little working-class town that had no black neighborhoods at all - one high school. We all played together. Everybody was either somebody from the South or an immigrant from East Europe or from Mexico. And there was one church, and there were four elementary schools. And we were all, pretty much until the end of the war, very, very poor.

I have the wonderful pleasure of finishing the book and closing it. And I don't read them later.