Mike Thomas

“This pleasure came precisely from being too clearly aware of your own degradation; from the feeling of having gone to the uttermost limits; that it is was vile, bit it could not have been otherwise; that you could not escape, you could never make yourself into a different person”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground & The Double

“Just because someone stumbles and loses their path, doesn't mean they're lost forever.”
― Charles Xavier (X-Men)

“In any case, it's not enough to be a liberal...That is something that people have a great deal of difficulty with. But it is not enough to be a liberal, to have the right attitudes and even to give money to the right causes. You have to know more than that. You have to be prepared to risk more than that. I am telling you this because I have watched what happened to many of my liberal friends when the civil rights movement was in Alabama, let us say, in the Deep South, and they were very indignant. And then I watched what happened imperceptibly but fatally when the same movement moved north to Brooklyn, to Pittsburgh, Detroit, and New York. And their attitudes changed. I really have to put it to you that way, but that is what happened. Their attitudes changed because they began to feel more and more threatened, and a liberal facade or even a liberal attitude was not enough to deal with the speed with which the movement was moving and the complications of American life as revealed in the fact by the interracial tensions in every major city, and being liberal was no defense against that and no interpretation of that.”
― James Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings

“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, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room