Byron Adams

“Wisely, Baldwin insisted that we are always more than our pain. Not only did he believe in our capacity to love, he felt black people were uniquely situated to risk loving because we had suffered.”
― bell hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love

“he realizes that this is the way it is, the way it must be: you don’t visit the lost, you visit the people who search for the lost.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Until I die there will be those moments, moments seeming to rise up out of the ground like Macbeth's witches, when his face will come before me, that face in all its changes, when the exact timbre of his voice and tricks of his speech will nearly burst my ears, when his smell will overpower my nostrils. Sometimes, in the days which are coming--God grant me the grace to live them-- in the glare of the grey morning, sour-mouthed, eyelids raw and red, hair tangled and damp from stormy sleep, facing, over coffee and cigarette smoke, last night's impenetrable, meaningless boy who will shortly rise and vanish like the smoke, I will see Giovanni again, as he was that night, so vivid, so winning, all of the light of that gloomy tunnel trapped around his head.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“Fairness is for happy people, for people who have been lucky enough to have lived a life defined more by certainties than by ambiguities.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life