"I had been sent away to help guarantee and perpetuate this indifference. No one, here, knew what was happening anywhere else. Perhaps no one ever knows that, anywhere: wherever here may be, it must always happen here before it can be perceived to have happened. And then, it is not really perceived, it is simply endured. Out of this endurance come, for the most part, alas, monuments, legends, and lies. People cling to these in order to deny that what happened is always happening; that what happened is not an event skewered and immobilized by time, but a continuing and timeless mirror of ourselves."
James Baldwin was an American writer and public intellectual known for essays, novels, and social criticism on race and identity. His major works include Go Tell It on the Mountain and The Fire Next Time.