To accept one's past — one's history — is not the same thing as drowning it it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it … - James Baldwin

He was silent for a long while. Then: 'You do, sometimes, remind me of the kind of man who is tempted to put himself in prison in order to avoid being hit by a car.'

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking on the road; the perspective to say the very least, changes only with the journey; only when the road has, all abruptly and treacherously, and with an absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place.