She fitted in my arms, she always had, and the shock of holding her caused me to feel that my arms had been empty since she had been away.

There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.

Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore

If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.

There are women who have forgotten that to be a woman doesn't simply mean humiliation, doesn't simply mean bitterness. I haven't forgotten it yet...I'm not going to forget it.

The world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.

This was not as real as my despairing sense that nothing was real for me, nothing would ever be real for me again – unless, indeed, this sensation of falling was reality…

The real troubles with living is that living is so banal.

There's the risk of being loved...and that would keep me from being happy.

I simply wish to continue to learn, & try to do what I have to do, better.

The fire trucks are out, there are thousands of people in the streets. You have a choice. You can have this, or you let Negroes eat at the lunch counters.

What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.

A ship in port is safe, but that's not what ships are built for.

Religion and morality are critical to how students think about politics and form opinions on political issues.

There can be many bars, wires that keep a person trapped. All of them don't have to have been created for the purpose of harming or caging the bird, but they still serve that function.

As a people we do not need anyone else's stamp of approval.

Look Back in forgiveness, forward in hope, down in compassion and up in gratitude.