Sublime

when the teacher asked me what my full name was, I calmly told him "Booker Washington,"

Shall I make him the narrator of his own tale?"

He is in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea: he is sharpened to one painful point.

Wright did not see himself as a washed-up case. He must have looked and sounded like the past, the shadow of Grosvenor Cleveland’s America. But he was vital, energetic. He had long believed that an honest arrogance was preferable to a hypocritical modesty. From criticism, he took combative inspiration.

In himself man is essentially a beast, only he butters it over like a slice of bread with a little decorum.