We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough. - Ralph Ellison

[T]he world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.

Closed societies are now the flimsiest of illusions, for all the outsiders are demanding in.

Deep at the dark bottom of the melting pot, where the private is public and the public private, where black is white and white black, where the immoral becomes moral and the moral is anything that makes one feel good (or that one has the power to sustain), the white man's relish is apt to be the black man's gall.