It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than a sense of life itself.

Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.

Don't leave inferences to be drawn when evidence can be presented.

Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.

Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.

But the color of a Negro's skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target

All literature is protest.

Violence is a personal necessity for the oppressed...It is not a strategy consciously devised. It is the deep, instinctive expression of a human being denied individuality.

Love grows from stable relationships, shared experience, loyalty, devotion, trust.

I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt that I had to go somewhere and do something to redeem my being alive.

Make up your mind, Snail! You are half inside your house, And halfway out!

We cultivate our feelings the way we cultivate a garden: we can't entirely prevent weeds from coming up, but we can take care to remove them before they do much harm.

Any accomplishment is possible with God’s grace.

No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.

That's no moon. It's a space station.

Let us work as if success depended upon ourselves alone, but with heartfelt conviction that we are doing nothing, and God everything.

Simply by our proximity to Jesus, we can bring hope and life to people and places trapped in discouragement and despair.

Nothing the desert produces expresses it better than the unhappy growth of the tree yuccas

Anybody who is not shocked by this subject has failed to understand it. [of quantum mechanics]

Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits.

Vancouver is the most wonderful place. I put it up there with San Francisco and Sydney as a kind of magic sort of harbor city.