It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substitut…

Now, leaving aside all the physical factors one can quote - leaving aside the rape or murder, leaving aside the bloody catalogue of oppression which we are too…

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

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations - such is a pleasure beyond compare.

The women in my life have all been librarians, English teachers, or booksellers. If they couldn't speak pidgin Tolstoy, articulate Henry James, or give me dire…

If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly by the hand, before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.