"I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of all I find that I love. In order to get some of it down I have to love. I sell you no phony forgiveness, I'm a desperate man—but too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate. So I approach it through division. So I denounce and I defend and I hate and I love."

"America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain. It's "winner take nothing" that is the great truth of our country or of any country. Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat. Our fate is to become one, and yet many— This is not prophecy, but description."

"And I knew that it was better to live out one's own absurdity than to die for that of others."

"[T]he world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me."

"And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals."

"Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway?—diversity is the word."

"For now I had begun to believe, despite all the talk of science around me, that there was a magic in spoken words."

"I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers."

"Everywhere I've turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my good—only they were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?"

"And yet I am what they think I am."

"Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?"

"They were very much the same, each attempting to force his picture of reality upon me and neither giving a hoot in hell for how things looked to me."

"So she doesn't think Iʼm black enough. What does she want, a black-face comedian? [...] Maybe she wants to see me sweat coal tar, ink, shoe polish, graphite. What was I, a man or a natural resource?"

"The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled."

"When I discover who I am, I'll be free."

"If only all the contradictory voices shouting inside my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn't care so long as they sang without dissonance."

"And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set."

"But we are all human, I thought, wondering what I meant."

"[T]here's always an element of crime in freedom."

"[T]he world is possibility if only you'll discover it."

"[T]o hell with being ashamed of what you liked."

"Words are everything and don't you forget it, ever."

"Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn't know, I couldn't give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had a long road back to the campus before me."

"I recall the sudden arpeggios of laughter lilting across the tender, springtime grass — gay-welling, far-floating, fluent, spontaneous, a bell-like feminine fluting, then suppressed; as though snuffed swiftly and irrevocably beneath the quiet solemnity of the vespered air now vibrant with somber chapel bells."

"Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or a moaning dove."

"Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it."

"[Y]ou both fail to understand what is happening to you. You cannot see or hear or smell the truth of what you see — and you, looking for destiny! It’s classic! And the boy, this automaton, he was made of the very mud of the region and sees far less than you. Poor stumblers, neither of you can see the other. To you he is a mark on the score-card of your achievement, a thing and not a man; a child, or even less — a black, amorphous thing. And you, for all your power, are not a man to him, but a God, a force..."

"Play the game, but don't believe in it."

"Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked."

"What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?"

"The truth is the light and light is the truth."

"A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action."

"I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me? And wait until I reveal how truly irresponsible I am. Responsibility rests upon recognition, and recognition is a form of agreement."

"[T]he end is in the beginning and lies far ahead."

"It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves."

"It's when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin to bump people back. And, let me confess, you feel that way most of the time. You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you're a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it's seldom successful."

"All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself."

"[T]here are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers."

"[R]emember that the antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize clear ideas. Or as Emerson insisted, the development of consciousness, consciousness, consciousness. And with consciousness a more refined conscientiousness, and most of all, that tolerance which takes the form of humor, for when Americans can no longer laugh at each other, they have to fight one another."

"The work of art is, after all, an act of faith in our ability to communicate symbolically."

"I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time been ashamed."

"Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear."

"I am a novelist, not an activist... But I think that no one who reads what I write or who listens to my lectures can doubt that I am enlisted in the freedom movement. As an individual, I am primarily responsible for the health of American literature and culture. When I write, I am trying to make sense out of chaos. To think that a writer must think about his Negroness is to fall into a trap."

"Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself."

"Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values."

"I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me."

"At best Americans give but limited attention to history. Too much happens too rapidly, and before we can evaluate it, or exhaust its meaning or pleasure, there is something new to concern us. Ours is the tempo of the motion picture, not that of the still camera, and we waste experience as we wasted the forest."

"Let's not play these kids cheap; let's find out what they have that is a strength. What do they have that you can approach and build a bridge upon? Education is all a matter of building bridges, it seems to me."

"If you can show me how I can cling to that which is real to me, while teaching me a way into the larger society, then I will not only drop my defenses and my hostility, but I will sing your praises and help you to make the desert bear fruit."