We don't need any more writers as solitary heroes. We need a heroic writer's movement: assertive, militant, pugnacious.

I want to feel what I feel. What's mine. Even if it's not happiness, whatever that means. Because you're all you've got.

It comforts everybody to think of all Negroes as dirt poor, and to regard those who were not, who earned good money and kept it, as some kind of shameful miracle. White people liked that idea because Negroes with money and sense made them nervous. Colored people liked it because, in those days, they trusted poverty, believed it was a virtue and a sure sign of honesty. Too much money had a whiff of evil and somebody else's blood.

In the treatment of poverty nationally, one fact stands out: there are twice as many white poor as Negro poor in the United States. Therefore I will not dwell on the experiences of poverty that derive from racial discrimination, but will discuss the poverty that affects white and Negro alike.

She missed -- without knowing what she missed-- paints and crayons

How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.