“you think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. it was dostoevsky and dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people.”
- james baldwin for life magazine, 1963
james baldwin was born 2 august 1924. he is pictured here in 1962.