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.

Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.

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

My friend was about to introduce me when she looked at me and smiled and said, "Whose little boy are you?"

True rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers,and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one's life.

Those kids aren't dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don't get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.

Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.

I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village, waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, 'Look.' I looked and all I saw was water. And he said, 'Look again,' which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a great revelation to me. I can't explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you've had that experience, you see differently.

Heavenly witnesses are a tricky lot, to be used by whoever is closest to Heaven at the time. And legend and theology, which are designed to sanctify our fears, crimes, and aspirations, also reveal them for what they are.

The making of an American begins at that point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.