Quotes About Challenge

The determination to outwit one's situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.

We stared at each other across a narrow space that was full of danger, that almost seemed to roar, like flame. 'Come,' he said.

Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundation.

But our humanity is our burden, our life; we need not battle for it; we need only to do what is infinitely more difficult—that is, accept it.

It was another fear, a fear that the child, in challenging the white world's assumptions, was putting himself in the path of destruction.

The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too. . .the history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. For even when the worst has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met. . . This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.

It is said that [Shakespeare's] time was easier than ours, but I doubt it—no time can be easy if one is living through it.

I am saying that a journey is called that because you cannot know what you will discover on the journey, what you will do with what you find, or what you find will do to you.

On the contrary, we have a very deep-seated distrust of real intellectual effort (probably because we suspect that it will destroy, as I hope it does, that myth of America to which we cling so desperately).

There is often something beautiful, there is always something awful, in the spectacle of a a person who has lost one of his faculties, a faculty he never questioned until it was gone, and who struggles to recover it. Yet people remain people, on crutches or indeed on deathbeds....

Something touched his imagination for a moment, suggesting that Leona was a person and had her story and that all stories were trouble.

in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand

p. 92) I know my robe's going to fit me well. I tried it on at the gates of Hell.

they stormed all over me, my awakening, my insistent possibilities.

Sometimes I think I'll just give up. But – how do you give up?

It had been written because he was afraid, afraid of things dark, strange, dangerous, difficult, and deep.

Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.

What you people don't know,' she said, 'is that life is a bitch, baby. It's the biggest hype going. You don't have any experience in paying your dues and it's going to be rough on you, baby, when the deal goes down. There're lots of back dues to be collected, and I know damn well you haven't got a penny saved.

We had, in effect, been playing a deadly game and he was the winner. He was the winner in spite of the fact that I had cheated to win.

What a long way, I thought, I've come — to be destroyed!

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity. Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame.

The fear that I heard in my father's voice, for example, when he realized that I really believed I could do anything a white boy could do, and had every intention of proving it, was not at all like the fear I heard when one of us was ill or had fallen down

We take our shape within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth.

The fear that I heard in my father's voice, for example, when he realized that I really believed I could do anything a white boy could do, and had every intention of proving it, was not at all like the fear I heard when one of us was ill or had fallen down the stairs or strayed too far from the house. It was another fear, a fear that the child, in challenging the white world's assumptions, was putting himself in the path of destruction.