You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liber… - James Baldwin

Love has never been a popular movement. And no one's ever wanted, really, to be free. The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people. Otherwise, of course, you can despair. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you've got to remember is what you're looking at is also you. Everyone you're looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide, in yourself, not to be.

All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand; and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.

Well,’ I said, ‘Paris is old, is many centuries. You feel, in Paris, all the time gone by. That isn’t what you feel in New York — ’He was smiling. I stopped.
‘What do you feel in New York?’ he asked.
‘Perhaps you feel,’ I told him, ‘all the time to come. There’s such power there, everything is in such movement. You can’t help wondering — I can’t help wondering — what it will all be like — many years from now.