Quotes from the World for Wednesday 09/28/MMXI

Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.

James Baldwin
James Baldwin (1924–1987), U.S. author. repr. in Notes of a Native Son, pt. 1 (1955). “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” Partisan Review (New Brunswick, N.J., June 1949).