Kate

“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state on innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”
― James Baldwin

“This was not the man they had known, but they had scarcely expected to be confronted with him; this was, in a sense deeper than questions of fact, the man they had not known, and the man they had not known may have been the real one. The real man, whoever he had been, had suffered and now he was dead: this was all that was sure and all that mattered now.”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“One writes out of one thing only--one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am, also, much more than that. So are we all.”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son