“I wish to cup knowledge in my hand and drink it as one drinks water by the side of the stream.”

“But I was still alive, and in my book, where there's life, there's hope.”

“I had never seen a prison, nor had I even imagined one, but there is a racial memory in man that instinctively knows of these things. The architecture of misery has an unmistakable look and feel about it.”

“I knew then that the person on the outside was only a shell, a presence to be seen and provoked. Inside was the real me, where my tears joined the tears of all the sad people to form the three waterfalls in the night country.”

“my only desire is to teach the word o' man and leave the word o' Gawd to the pulpit men”

“. . . God is too busy making the sun come up and go down and watching so the moon floats just right in the sky to be concerned with color . . . only man wants always God should be there to condemn this one and save that one. Always it is man who wants to make heaven and hell. God is too busy training the bees to make honey and every morning opening up all the new flowers for business.”

“Then I felt like having a piss and I did that”