"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."

"We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours."

"Rage cannot be hidden, it can only be dissembled. This dissembling deludes the thoughtless, and strengthens rage and adds, to rage, contempt."

"The future is like heaven - everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now."

"It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have."

"Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them."

"The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out."

"The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible."

"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."

"But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power."

"The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black."

"The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him."

"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."

"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."

"Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses."

"I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all."

"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."

"Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within."

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

"Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the battle field."

"Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck -- but, most of all, endurance."

"There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention."

"One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return."

"Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses"

"Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it."

"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 young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did--which was to hide."

"I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually."

"It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind."

"It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive."

"People can cry much easier than they can change."

"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 future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now."

"The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in."

"To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time."

"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."

"Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black."

"The writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all."

"Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law."

"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."

"No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it."

"The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions."

"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."

"I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain."

"The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an immediate knowledge of its ugly side."

"The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever."

"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."

"To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger."

"I want to be an honest man and a good writer."

"American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it."