James Baldwin — "The people who hurt you are not better than you. They are just luckier."

"The world is before you, and you need not take it, or suffer it, for what it is. You can also make it what it will be."

"One writes out of one thing only: one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one has examined one’s experience."

"I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually."

"The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you've got to find your own way to live and nobody can tell you how."

"People who believe that they are white, and act on that belief, have to remain in a state of moral arrest."