There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
When things were very bad his soul just crawled behind his heart and curled up and went to sleep
The needs of a society determine its ethics, and in the Black American ghettos the hero is that man who is offered only the crumbs from his country's table but by ingenuity and courage is able to take for himself a Lucullan feast. Hence the janitor w...
It was awful to be Negro and have no control over my life. It was brutal to be young and already trained to sit quietly and listen to charges brought against my color with no chance of defense. We should all be dead. I thought I should like to see us...
The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power. The fact that the adult American N...
People whose history and future were threatened each day by extinction considered that it was only by divine intervention that they were able to live at all. I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's w...
Until recently each generation found it more expedient to plead guilty to the charge of being young and ignorant, easier to take the punishment meted out by the older generation (which had itself confessed to the same crime short years before). The c...
The caged bird sings with a fearful trill, of things unknown, but longed for still, and his tune is heard on the distant hill, for the caged bird sings of freedom.
Life is going to give you just what you put in it. Put your whole heart in everything you do, and pray, then you can wait.
Language is man's way of communicating with his fellow man and it is language alone which separates him from the lower animals.
Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.
Few, if any, survive their teens
I had given up some youth for knowledge, but my gain was more valuable than the loss
To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision.
