You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enoug… - James Baldwin

At the rate things are going here, all of Africa will be free before we can get a lousy cup of coffee.

Youth must be the worst time in anybody's life. Everything's happening for the first time, which means that sorrow, then, lasts forever. Later, you can see that there was something very beautiful in it. That's because you ain't got to go through it no more.

To accept one's past - one's history - is not the same things as drowning in it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.