Read and Be a Good Witness

Perhaps I will order the stack of a dozen used books to celebrate the woman who said I couldn't read. Perhaps I should celebrate the woman who overcame the monster. Why give the devil any more credit.

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin

The very thing I knew would set me free was the thing my mother forbade me to do. Read. Be athletic. Makes sense in a horrible way. This is how it is for children of narcissists. It's like we grew up trying to avoid the sky. Sky is mother and earth is father or vice a versa.

"I had wonderful parents who loved me, my librarian said, "and I can't believe the way the parents treat their kids. I see it every day at the library."
"Now it's a chance to be a good witness because that can save a child's life! That's what saved mine!" I said, laughing.

I had amazing teachers and the parents of friends of mine invited me into their homes to escape when I was in elementary and middle school and high school.

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.”
― James Baldwin

“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
― James Baldwin

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
― James Baldwin

“All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.”
― James Baldwin

“People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.”
― James Baldwin

“Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”
― James Baldwin

“The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. ”
― James Baldwin

“People can cry much easier than they can change.”
― James Baldwin

“It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.”
― James Baldwin