Rebecca Evans

“There is an illusion about America, a myth about America to which we are clinging which has nothing to do with the lives we lead and I don't believe that anybody in this country who has really thought about it or really almost anybody who has been brought up against it--and almost all of us have one way or another--this collision between one's image of oneself and what one actually is is always very painful and there are two things you can do about it, you can meet the collision head-on and try and become what you really are or you can retreat and try to remain what you thought you were, which is a fantasy, in which you will certainly perish.”
― James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name

“Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.”
― James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name

“The Kantian Paradigm embraces what I am calling the Empirical Directive by changing the conception of the self from a substance like Descartes’ thinking thing to a functional experience-organizing energeia which can only be studied by the way it organizes experience.”
― Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty. But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.”
― Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes Toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present