I would love to post 94 quotes to celebrate what would be seminal author James Baldwin’s 94th birthday, but instead I’m posting five. See the final quote for further explanation.

1. “Everybody’s journey is individual. If  you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.”
2. “People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.”
3. “American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”
4. “The writer’s greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, [yet] at the same time, he needs no one at all.”
5. “When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.”