You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read

These words are genuinely James Baldwin's, spoken to journalist Jane Howard for her extensive profile "Doom and glory of knowing who you are," published in LIFE magazine on May 24, 1963 (Vol. 54, No. 21, p. 89) — the week after Baldwin appeared on the cover of TIME at the height of his civil-rights fame. In the original, the line does not stand alone: Baldwin continues that it was "Dostoevsky and Dickens" who taught him that the things that tormented him most were the very things that connected him with everyone who had ever been alive, part of his larger meditation on reading as an antidote to isolation and on the artist as "a sort of emotional or spiritual historian." The popular one-sentence fragment ending at "but then you read" is a faithful truncation, not a distortion. A widely circulated variant swaps "Dostoevsky and Dickens" for "books," which traces to a slightly different phrasing Baldwin used in a WNEW-TV narrative excerpted by The New York Times in 1964; both are authentically his. We found no competing author and no evidence the line predates Baldwin, so the attribution is secure.