James Baldwin

And she carried him, as the sea will carry a boat: with a slow, rocking and rising and falling motion, barely suggestive of the violence of the deep.

The first such truth is that the mind is not the possession of man alone.

that we are able to get real knowledge about the mind.

this is the fact that minds vary much in different individuals, or classes of individuals

mental diseases teach us much about the normal mind.

Negro nursemaids, turning a stony face on the grownup world, crooned anxiously into baby carriages

sitting still, either with an immense, invisible effort which all but shattered the benches and the trees, or else with a limpness which indicated that they would never move again

vindictively married and progenitive and fat

were dreaming the same dreams they had dreamed ten years before, clothed these in the same arguments, quoted the same masters; and dispensed, as they hideously imagined, the same charm they had possessed before their teeth began to fail and their hair began to fall

They were more hostile now than they had been, this was the loud, inescapable change in their tone and the only vitality left in their eyes