James Baldwin

"Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within."

"Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go."

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

"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. 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."

"The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in."

"It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind."

"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read."

"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."