Black Boy Quotes
"Each event spoke with a cryptic tongue. And the moments of living slowly revealed their coded meanings."
"I burned to learn to read novels and I tortured my mother into telling me the meaning of every strange word I saw."
"My sense of life deepened and the feel of things was different, somehow."
"I did not know enough to be afraid or to anticipate in a concrete manner."
"Whenever I thought of the essential bleakness of black life in America, I knew that Negroes had never been allowed to catch the full spirit of Western civilization, that they lived somehow in it but not of it."
"The sensations the story aroused in me were never to leave me."
"I realized that they could not understand what I was feeling and I kept quiet."
"I had tasted what to me was life, and I would have more of it, somehow, someway."
"The most abiding feeling I had each day was hunger and fear."
"Her life set the emotional tone of my life, colored the men and women I was to meet in the future, conditioned my relation to events that had not yet happened, determined my attitude to situations and circumstances I had yet to face."
"These fantasies were no longer a reflection of my reaction to the white people, they were a part of my living, of my emotional life; they were a culture, a creed, a religion."
"I had never in my life been abused by whites, but I had already become as conditioned to their existence as though I had been the victim of a thousand lynchings."
"I became skilled in ignoring these cosmic threats and developed a callousness toward all metaphysical preachments."
"The desire for play was gone and I brooded, wondering if Granny would come and help us."
"The spirit I had caught gave me insight into the sufferings of others, made me gravitate toward those whose feelings were like my own."
"Anything seemed possible, likely, feasible, because I wanted everything to be possible… Because I had no power to make things happen outside of me in the objective world, I made things happen within."
"A somberness of spirit that I was never to lose settled over me during the slow years of my mother's unrelieved suffering, a somberness that was to make me stand apart and look upon excessive joy with suspicion."
"The naked will to power seemed always to walk in the wake of a hymn."
"I reasoned that if there did exist an all-wise, all-powerful God who knew the beginning and the end, who meted out justice to all, who controlled the destiny of man, this God would surely know that I doubted His existence and He would laugh at my foolish denial of Him."
"My body grew, even on mush and lard gravy, a miracle which the church certainly should have claimed credit for."
"I had never in my life done anything like it; I had made something, no matter how bad it was; and it was mine."
"The peace that passes understanding never dwelt with us."
"The entire thing seemed unreal. I had been confronted so suddenly with struggle that I could not pull all the strings of the situation together at once."
"Deep into wet pits of clay, into sticky ditches, up slippery slopes I would struggle with the pail."
"The main value in their lives was simple, clean, good living and when they thought they had found those same qualities in one of their race, they instinctively embraced him, liked him, and asked no questions."
"I had learned to know these people better in five hours than I had learned to know my own family in five years."
"Money ain't everything. You got a good Christian heart and everybody ain't got that."
"You don't have to pay me to eat. Go in the kitchen and eat. That's all."
"I just won't let you eat out of a can in my house."
"Why do you want to eat out of a can when you can set at the table with us?"
"You just ain't never had no home life. I'm sorry for you."
"When a girl likes a man, she combs his hair."
"What was this? I stood up, trying to realize what reality lay behind the meaning of the words…Yes, 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 could fight the southern whites by organizing with other Negroes, as my grandfather had done. But I knew that I could never win that way; there were many whites and there were but few blacks. They were strong and we were weak."
"I now felt that I knew what the white men were feeling. Merely because I had read a book that had spoken of how they lived and thought, I identified myself with that book."
"I had fled one insecurity and had embraced another."
"I was learning already from the frantic light in her eyes the strain that the city imposed upon its people."
"I reasoned thus: Though English was my native tongue and America my native land, she, an alien, could operate a store and earn a living in a neighborhood where I could not even live."
"I never discussed my reading with Mr. Falk, who had lent me his library card; it would have meant talking about myself and that would have been too painful."
"I was persisting in reading my present environment in the light of my old one."
"I did not discuss my reading with Mr. Falk, who had lent me his library card; it would have meant talking about myself and that would have been too painful."
"The words of their souls were the syllables of popular songs."
"Though I had fled the pressure of the South, my outward conduct had not changed."
"The only ways in which I felt that my feelings could go outward without fear of rude rebuff or searing reprisal was in writing or reading, and to me they were ways of living."
"I wanted a life in which there was a constant oneness of feeling with others, in which the basic emotions of life were shared, in which common memory formed a common past, in which collective hope reflected a national future."
"I had no sense of being inferior or superior to the people about me; I merely felt that they had had no chance to learn to live differently."
"If I could fasten the mind of the reader upon words so firmly that he would forget words and be conscious only of his response, I felt that I would be in sight of knowing how to write narrative."
"To me, my losing was only another manifestation of that queer, material way of American living that computed everything in terms of the concrete: weight, color, race, fur coats, radios, electric refrigerators, cars, money..."
"I had long ago emotionally rejected the world in which I lived and my reaction was: Well, this is the system by which people want the world to run whether it helps them or not."
"It seemed to me that for the Negro to try to save himself he would have to forget himself and try to save a confused, materialistic nation from its own drift toward self-destruction."
"The most cherished experience a bottle of whisky, the most sought-after prize somebody else’s wife."
"The millions that I would fear are those who do not dream of the prizes that the nation holds forth, for it is in them, though they may not know it, that a revolution has taken place and is biding its time to translate itself into a new and strange way of life."
"For me, the Communist party was like the sun coming out from behind the clouds."
"I’ve been asked to rid the club of traitors."
"I admitted his great revolutionary fervor, but I felt that his zeal was a trifle excessive."
"I’ve had no word from Comrade Young. As soon as any is received, I’ll inform the club."
"You’ll have to prove your revolutionary loyalty."
"The Soviet Union has had to shoot a lot of intellectuals."
"That’s a primitive way to measure sincerity."
"It’s his duty to keep track of the people he’s trying to defend."
"I had made the first total emotional commitment of my life."
"I had thought that they might refuse me on the grounds that I was not politically advanced."
"It was inconceivable to me, though bred in the lap of southern hate, that a man could not have his say."
"I’ve got to go it alone…I’ve got to learn how again…"
"Could a Negro ever live halfway like a human being in this goddamn country?"
"I’ve been around with those white artists on the North Side too much."
"You seem convinced that I’m easily confused."
"You’re not in Russia. You’re standing on a sidewalk in Chicago."
"I’ve never read Trotsky. What’s his stand on minorities?"
"I’m not suggesting anything. I’m explaining."
"I’ll be for them, even though they are not for me."
"I did not know that night how little I understood the political party to which I had belonged."
"I simply do not wish to be bound any longer by the party’s decisions."
"I would have been afraid to lift my right hand."
"I had embraced their aims with the freest impulse I had ever known."
"I had not been aware of holding wrong ideas."
"I had merely confronted my comrades, stated what I felt, and had let it go at that."
"Perhaps, I told myself, when the Communist party has grown up, I will go back."
"I was angry with myself, angry with him, angry with the party."
"But I soon learned, learned how simple were my motives, how trusting was my attitude."
"I lay in bed that night and said to myself: I’ll be for them, even though they are not for me."