Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.
Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.
To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the making of bread.
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.
American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.
To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.
I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.
When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.
Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.
Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.
The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.
Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.
If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not.
The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
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.
There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.
The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.
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.
Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.
I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.
Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities.
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.
The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love.
The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.
When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn't a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.
It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
