Black Boy Quotes

“It might have been that my tardiness in learning to sense white people as ‘white’ people came from the fact that many of my relatives were ‘white’-looking people. My grandmother, who was white as any ‘white’ person, had never looked ‘white’ to me.”

“I knew that my life was revolving about a world that I had to encounter and fight when I grew up.”

“I had begun to notice that my mother became irritated when I questioned her about whites and blacks, and I could not quite understand it.”

“Had a black boy announced that he aspired to be a writer, he would have been unhesitatingly called crazy by his pals. Or had a black boy spoken of yearning to get a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, his friends--in the boy’s own interest--would have reported his odd ambition to the white boss.”

“I stood on the sidewalks of New York with a black skin, practically no money, and I was not absorbed with the burning questions of the left-wing literary movement in the United States, but with the problem of how to get a bath.”

“It was on reputedly disreputable Beale Street in Memphis that I had met the warmest, friendliest person I had ever known, that I discovered that all human beings were not mean.”

“If I were a member of the class that rules, I would post men in all the neighborhoods of the nation, not to spy upon or club rebellious workers, not to break strikes or disrupt unions; but to ferret out those who no longer respond to the system in which they live.”

“Then how could one live in a world in which one’s mind and perceptions meant nothing and authority and tradition meant everything?”

“I had already begun to sense that my feelings varied too far from those of the people around me for me to blab about what I felt.”

“I walked home slowly, asking myself what on earth was the matter with me, why it was I never seemed to do things as people expected them to be done. Every word and gesture I made seemed to provoke hostility.”

“I wanted a life in which there was a constant oneness of feeling with others, in which the basic emotions of life were shared.”

“My writing was my way of seeing, my way of living, my way of feeling.”

“The day I begged bread from the city officials was the day that showed me I was not alone in my loneliness, society had cast millions of others with me.”

“Already my personality was lopsided; my knowledge of feeling was far greater than my knowledge of fact. Though I was not aware of it, the next four years were to be the only opportunity for formal study in my life.”

“My life . . . in America had led me to feel . . . that the problem of human unity was more important than bread, more important than physical living itself.”

“For I felt that without a common bond uniting men, without a continuous current of shared thought and feeling circulating through the social system, like blood coursing through the body, there could be no living worthy of being called human.”

“I had lived so utterly isolated a life that the club filled for me a need that could not be imagined by the white members who were becoming disgusted with it, whose normal living had given them what I was so desperately trying to get.”

“Alone, they said, a man was weak; united with others, he was strong.”

“This man was fighting, fighting with words. He was using words as a weapon, using them as one would use a club. Could words be weapons? Well, yes, for here they were.”

“I went to school, feeling that my life depended not so much upon learning as upon getting into another world of people.”