“It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”
— James Baldwin
Harlem-born novelist, playwright, essayist, and social critic James Baldwin was born today in 1924 (he would have been 88). He is the author of many great works including Go Tell It On the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, and Another Country.
“Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.”
― Honoré de Balzac
“Is there some lesson on how to be friends?
I think what it means is that central to living
a life that is good is a life that’s forgiving.
We’re creatures of contact regardless of whether
we kiss or we wound. Still, we must come together.
Though it may spell destruction, we still ask for more—
since it beats staying dry but so lonely on shore.
So we make ourselves open while knowing full well
it’s essentially saying “please, come pierce my shell.”
― David Rakoff
“It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
“It wasn’t so much that I was afraid of the place itself, but I was afraid of the creatures who masqueraded as people.”
― Natsuo Kirino, Real World
