“another gash has openedin the center of myself.The farther that I travelfrom the things I know, the more I am certainI can only mend this widening woundby moving onto things I have not known.”

“I was a new person then, I knew things I had not known before, I knew things that you can know only if you have been through what I had just been through.”

“The American revolution, the terms are these: not that I drive you out or that you drive me out, but that we come together and embrace and learn to live together. That is the only way that we can have achieved the American revolution. Now, if we can face this, it involves facing a great many things. It demands that white people face the fact that I, for example, or any black person they will ever meet or have ever met—I am not an exotic rarity. I am not a stranger. I am none of those things. On the contrary, for all you know, for all you know, I might be your uncle, your brother, your cousin, among other things. One of the things that has happened here—and the pathology of the Deep South proves it; so does the pathology of the North, which dictates to them that they move out and I move in—among other things which have to be excavated here is the fact that this long history is also the history of a love affair.”

“I do not confer praise or blame: I accept. I am the measure of all things. I am the center of the world.”

“I am not ultimately interested in writing fiction. I can't make things up. Or rather, I can only make things up about things that have already happened.”

“It's not that I am not moved by these things, that I don't them in my life. But lately, their power has diminished." - 140”