But we are all human, I thought, wondering what I meant. 
Dr. Gordon S. Seagrave, the famous "Burma Surgeon. 
Hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action. 
Do they come to bury the others or to be entombed to give life or to receive it? 
I ran away into the dark, laughing so hard I feared I might rupture myself. 
My hole is warm and full of light. 
In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live. 
For now I had begun to believe, despite all the talk of science around me, that there was a magic in spoken words. 
Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear. 
while fiction is but a form of symbolic action, a mere game of "as if," therein lies its true function and its potential for effecting change. 
Gin, jazz and dreams were not enough. 
I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed. 
It's the little things that find us out, the little things we refuse to do in order to avoid doing the big things that can save us. 
Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself. 
He's only a man. Remember that. He's only a man! 
because what is commonly assumed to be past history is actually as much a part of the living present as William Faulkner insisted. 
Be your own father, young man 
Call me Jack-the-Bear, for I am in a state of hibernation. 
The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike. 
Ride 'em, cowboy. Give 'em hell and bananas. 
He only wanted to use me for something. Everyone wanted to use you for some purpose. 
I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me. 
The truth is the light and the light is the truth. 
And sometimes the difference between individual and organized indignation is the difference between criminal and political action. 
Commercial rock 'n' roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression. 
Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet handy 
All boundaries down, freedom was not only the recognition of necessity, it was the recognition of possibility. 
To hell with being ashamed of what you liked. 
All dreamers and sleepwalkers must pay the price, and even the invisible victim is responsible for the fate of all. 
Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat. 
To see around corners is enough (that is not unusual when you are invisible). But to hear around them is too much; it inhibits action. 
Tell them to teach them that when they call you nigger to make a rhyme with trigger it makes the gun backfire 
All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. 
All it takes to get along in this here man's town is a little shit, grit, and mother-wit. 
God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity. 
A start is a start, and 'is' is 'is' not 'was'. 
It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow. 
they could talk and agree with themselves, the world was nailed down, and they loved it. They received a feeling of security. 
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. 
If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy. 
Let man keep his many parts and you'll have no tyrant states. 
too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate. 
The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas. 
And in order for the Negro to fulfill his duty as a citizen it was often necessary that he fight for his self-affirmed right to fight. 
Education is all a matter of building bridges. 
The 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. 
Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked. 
Some things are just too unjust for words, and too ambiguous for either speech or ideas. 
Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove. 
How could you treat a Negro as equal in war and then deny him equality during times of 
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 on the other hand, it would be a great mistake to assume that the dead are absolutely powerless. 
You're very insistent, but I'm very busy. 
Live with your head in the lion's mouth. 
Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains. 
Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you? 
For their most innocent words were acts of violence to which we of the campus were hypersensitive though we endured them not. 
We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough. 
The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have. 
The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead. 
I'd been so fascinated by the notion, that I'd forgotten to measure what it was bringing forth. I'd been asleep, dreaming. 
They could laugh at him but they couldn't ignore him 
The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it. 