It seems to be typical of life in America ... that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.

In the invincible and indescribable squalor of Harlem ... I was tormented. I felt caged, like an animal. I wanted to escape. I felt if I did not get out I would slowly strangle.

He could be helped in a certain way only because he was hurt in a certain way; and his help is simply to be enabled to move from one conundrum to the next ... from one disaster to the next.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

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.

Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves; the loss of our own identity7 is the price we pay for our annulment of his.

The wonder is not that so many Negro boys and girls are ruined but that so many survive.

Negro servants have been smuggling odds and ends out of white homes for generations, and white people have been delighted to have them do it, because it has assuaged a dim guilt and testified to the intrinsic superiority of white people.

It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers, you are the Indian.

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.