from James Baldwin's "Letter from a Region in My Mind"

We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.

There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.

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