The morning weighs on my shoulders with the dreadful weight of hope and I take the blue envelope which Jacques has sent me and tear it slowly into many pieces, watching them dance in the wind, watching the wind carry them away. Yet, as I turn and begin walking toward the waiting people, the wind blows some of them back on me.
And with every step I took it became more impossible for me to turn back. And my mind was empty—or it was as though my mind had become one enormous, anaesthetized wound. I thought only,One day I'll weep for this. One of these days I'll start to cry.
Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.
The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.
You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all.
To accept one's past - one's history - is not the same as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it.
You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world.
If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God can't do that, it's time we got rid of Him.
It is experience which shapes a person, and the peculiar experience of the Negro in America which gives him a particular insight into the problems which torment the world.
Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore.
The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.
I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also much more than that. So are we all.
Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.
It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.
The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.
The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.
