"The world is before you, and you need not take it, or suffer it, as it is, but can remake it, and remake yourself."

"People who believe that they are white, and people who believe that they are black, and people who believe that they are some other color, are all, equally, deluded."

"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read."

"The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people he's writing about."

"I was not a Negro. I was a Black man. And my country is not a country. It is a state of mind."