The Man Who Lived Underground

he had lived within the narrow grooves of habit so long that he had learned to see in his dark world without the aid of eyes,

Outside of time and space, he looked down upon the earth and saw that each fleeting day was a day of dying, that men died slowly with each passing moment as much as they did in war, that human grief and sorrow were utterly insufficient to this vast, dreary spectacle.

But if you accuse a man of something that he did not do, his behavior will be utterly unpredictable. It has the power of upsetting his entire way of life, coloring his feelings about people for a lifetime, and sowing the seeds of distrust so deep that they will grow and bear fruit for years afterwards.

What was this sense of guilt so seemingly innate, so easy to come by, to think, to feel, so verily physical? It seemed that when one felt this guilt one was but retracing in one’s living a faint pattern designed long before; it seemed that one was trying to remember a gigantic shock that had left an impression upon one’s body which one could not forget, but which had been almost forgotten by the conscious mind, creating in one a state of external anxiety.

Otherness. All members of oppressed minorities hold an innate understanding of it.

To me—rightly or wrongly—the hallmark of good writing resides precisely in this sense of creating the new, the freedom and the need and the desire to create this new.

she loved me; eternity was so real to her that human life had an air of unreality.

This tendency of freely juxtaposing totally unrelated images and symbols and then tying them into some overall concept, mood, feeling, is a trait of Negro thinking and that has always fascinated me.

Jesus, take me to your blessed home above and wrap me in the bosom of thy love...

He stopped laughing and stared. He was full of what he wanted to say, but he could not say it. He groped for words, but none came. One of the policemen walked over and reached out with his right hand and tugged at his sleeve.

Yes, the only being who could possibly gaze down upon such a hopeless spectacle and encompass its meaninglessness would have to be a god. That was it! Maybe men had invented gods to feel what they could not feel, and they found comfort in the pity of their gods for them...!

He sighed; yes, they were children, sleeping in their living, awake in their dying. . . .

As though for purposes of renewal, he had for a time gone back into the insensible world out of which life had originally sprung, and, before he could live again, hope or plan again, a regrouping of his faculties into a new personality structure would be necessary.

I’ve heard parents express horror at their children listening to crime stories on the radio; yet on Sunday mornings they never hesitate to send them off to Sunday school to hear the most horrific story of all. . . .)

My grandmother was an enemy of all books save those based upon or derived from the Bible.