Whose little boy are you? - James Baldwin

I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it — it, the physical act.

I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.

"He smiled, "Why, you will go home and then you will find that home is not home anymore. Then you will really be in trouble. As long as you stay here, you can always think: One day I will go home." He played with my thumb and grinned. "N'est-ce pas?"

"Beautiful logic," I said. "You mean I have a home to go to as long as I don't go there?"

He laughed. "Well, isn't it true? You don't have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.