the visioner will die

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

love him. love him and let him love you. do you think anything else under heaven really matters? and how long, at the best, can it last? since you are both men and have everywhere else to go? only five minutes, only five minutes, and most of that helas! in the dark. and if you think of them as dirty then they will be dirty—they will be dirty because you will be giving nothing, you will be despising your flesh and his. but you can make your time together anything but dirty; you can give each other something which will make both of you better—forever—if you will not be ashamed, if you will only not play it safe...you play it safe long enough...and you'll end up trapped in your own dirty body, forever and forever and forever—like me.

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”

you want to leave giovanni because he makes you stink. you want to despise giovanni because he is not afraid of the stink of love. you want to kill him in the name of all your lying little moralities. and you— you are immoral. you are, by far, the most immoral man i have met in all my life. look, look what you have done to me. do you think you could have done this if i did not love you? is this what you should do to love?