The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see. - James Baldwin

I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it — it, the physical act.

I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.

Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.