FridayJan 16, 2026
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
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.
[The Negro past] of rope, fire, torture, castration, infanticide, rape; death and humiliation; fear by day and night, fear as deep as the marrow of the bone; doubt that he was worthy of life, since everyone around him denied it; sorrow for his women, for his kinfolk, for his children, who needed his protection, and whom he could not protect; rage, hatred and murder, hatred for white men so deep that it often turned against him and his own, and made all love, all trust, all joy impossible.
Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.
One can only face in others what one can face in oneself.
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....
The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way ... people look at reality, then you can change it.
The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.
People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
It is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important.
The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid the state of being alone.
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.
The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.
The most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose.
Life is more important than art; that's what makes art important.
It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
Hatred destroys the person who hates.
The future is like heaven everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.
Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
Children have never been any good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.
Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
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.
Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits.
A liberal: someone who thinks he knows more about your experience than you do.
Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hate so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, fire next time.
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.
It is very nearly impossible ... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
Be careful what you set your heart upon, for it will surely be yours.
Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.
The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.
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