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The interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.
James Baldwin
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You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.
James Baldwin
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The price the white American paid for his ticket was to become white—and, in the main, nothing more than that, or, as he was to insist, nothing less.
James Baldwin
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Boy, ain't it time you was thinking about your soul?
James Baldwin
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Such figures as Boy George do not disturb me nearly so much as do those relentlessly hetero (sexual?) keepers of the keys and seals, those who know what the world needs in the way of order and who are ready and willing to supply that order.
James Baldwin
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Being in the pulpit, was like being in the theatre; I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion worked.
James Baldwin
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If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you'll never make it.
James Baldwin
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Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the battle field.
James Baldwin
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Our passion for categorization, life neatly fitted into pegs, has led to an unforeseen, paradoxical distress, confusion, a breakdown of meaning.
James Baldwin
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Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it.
James Baldwin
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After my best friend jumped off the bridge, I knew that I was next. So-Paris. With forty dollars and a one-way ticket.
James Baldwin
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If you really want to know something about solitude, become famous.
James Baldwin
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European society has always been divided into classes in a way that American society never has been. A European writer considers himself to be part of an old and honorable tradition--of intellectual activity, of letters--and his choice of a vocation does not cause him any uneasy wonder as to whether or not it will cost him all his friends. But this tradition does not exist in America.
James Baldwin
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To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced.
James Baldwin
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When you're writing, you're trying to find out something which you don't know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don't want to know, what you don't want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.
James Baldwin
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An American Negro, however deep his sympathies, or however bright his rage, ceases to be simply a black man when he faces a black man from Africa.
James Baldwin
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A man's balance depends on the weight he carries between his legs.
James Baldwin
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Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent.
James Baldwin
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You never get the book you wanted, you settle for the book you get.
James Baldwin
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Insofar as the American public creates a monster, they are not about to recognize it.
James Baldwin
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Painters have often taught writers how to see.
James Baldwin
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Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
James Baldwin
Creative Commons
Born:
August 2, 1924
Died:
December 1, 1987
(aged 63)
Bio:
James Arthur Baldwin was an African American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic.
Known for:
Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)
The Fire Next Time (1963)
Giovanni's Room (1956)
Notes of a Native Son (1955)
Another Country (1962)
Most used words:
people
life
love
time
white
man
negro
country
reality
true
american
black
freedom
experience
order
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