Faith & Spirit Quote by Armistead Maupin

Refusing to harden is the quiet bravado here. Maupin frames compassion not as a personality trait but as a decision he keeps making, despite ample evidence that the world would like him to stop. The phrasing matters: he has not "lost" faith, as if faith were an accident; he also hasn’t "decided" to be less compassionate, casting cynicism as an active choice, not a sophisticated inevitability. In a culture that treats irony as intelligence and detachment as self-protection, he’s calling out the pose.

The subtext is both tender and defiant: yes, he’s been given reasons to retreat. The line carries the faint outline of betrayal, exhaustion, and the kind of public cruelty that tempts people to generalize strangers into threats. Maupin declines the seduction of that generalization. "Strangers" is the keystone word. It’s easy to be kind to your circle and still be small-hearted; it’s harder to keep extending goodwill to people who owe you nothing and may never repay it. That’s the moral muscle he’s flexing.

Contextually, this reads like a novelist’s credo, especially from Maupin, whose work has long insisted that chosen family, urban proximity, and queer community can be sites of grace rather than danger. The intent isn’t naive optimism. It’s a boundary against the era’s favorite coping mechanism: converting disappointment into a permanent personality.