Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books...
Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.
If you've a notion of what man's heart is, wouldn't you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man's frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from himself? That there is a part of man that man wants to reject? That man wants to keep from knowing what he is? That he wants to protect himself from seeing that he is something awful? And that this 'awful' part of himself might not be as awful as he thinks, but he finds it too strange and he does not know what to do with it? We talk about what to do with the atom bomb...But man's heart, his spirit is the deadliest thing in creation. Are not all cultures and civilizations just screens which men have used to divide themselves, to put between that part of themselves which they are afraid of and that part of themselves which they wish, in their deep timidity, to try to preserve? Are not all of man's efforts at order an attempt to still man's fear of himself?
Maybe man is nothing in particular,' Cross said gropingly. 'Maybe that's the terror of it. Man may be just anything at all. And maybe man deep down suspects this, really knows this, kind of dreams that it is true; but at the same time he does not want really to know it? May not human life on this earth be a kind of frozen fear of man at what he could possibly be? And every move he makes might not these moves be just to hide this awful fact? To twist it into something which he feels would make him rest and breathe a little easier? What man is is perhaps too much to be borne by man...
If you posses enough courage to speak out what you are, you will find that you are not alone.
If a man confessed anything on his death bed, it was the truth; for no man could stare death in the face and lie.
I did not know if the story was factually true or not, but it was emotionally true [...].
The white folks like for us to be religious, then they can do what they want to with us.
Love grows from stable relationships, shared experience, loyalty, devotion, trust.
Men simply copied the realities of their hearts when they built prisons.
I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.
Don't leave inferences to be drawn when evidence can be presented.
