Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be - James Baldwin

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 cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.

All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

There're two things we have to do love each other and raise our children. We have to do that! The alternative, for me, would be suicide. (1984)