James Baldwin

“People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.”

“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.”

“Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.”

“Artists are here to disturb the peace.”

“The wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.”

“All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.”

“Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.”

“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”

“One must say Yes to life, and embrace it wherever it is found — and it is found in terrible places.”

“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”

“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”

“Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”