Julia Riggieri

“One must say Yes to life and embrace it wherever it is found—and it is found in terrible places; nevertheless, there it is.”
― James Baldwin

“I've got the guts to die. What I want to know is, have you got the guts to live?”
― Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

“I shall overcome everything, all the suffering, just in order to be able to say to myself: I am! Be it death by a thousand cuts—I am! Be it torture beyond endurance—I am! I may sit in a dungeon, but I exist; I see the sun, but if I didn’t see the sun, I’d still know it was there. And to know that the sun’s there, that’s the very stuff of life.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Karamazov Brothers

“If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring; whatever it bring must be borne. And at this level of experience one's bitterness begins to be palatable, and hatred becomes too heavy a sack to carry.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time