Black Boy Quotes

It might have been that my tardiness in learning to sense white people as "white" people came from the fact that many of my relatives were "white"-looking people. My grandmother, who was white as a...

"You just stay right where you are," she said in a deadly tone. "I’m going to teach you this night to stand up and fight for yourself."[…]"Take this money, this note, and this stick," she said....

In shaking hands I was doing something that I was to do countless times in the years to come: acting in conformity with what others expected of me even though, by the very nature and form of my lif...

I had already begun to sense that my feelings varied too far from those of the people around me for me to blab about what I felt. (1.3.306)

She whispered to me the story of Bluebeard and His Seven Wives and I ceased to see the porch, the sunshine, her face, everything. As her words fell upon my new ears, I endowed them with a reality t...

But no sooner had the preacher arrived than I began to resent him, for I learned at once that he, like my father, was used to having his own way. (1.1.269)

Yet when school let out that first day I ran joyously home with a brain burdened with racy and daring knowledge, but not a single idea from books. (1.1.266)

Anything seemed possible, likely, feasible, because I wanted everything to be possible...Because I had no power to make things happen outside of me in the objective world, I made things happen with...