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The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass and trees, but other people, has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can. And if one despairs— as who has not?— of human love, God's love alone is left.
James Baldwin
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I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born, in principle, in a society in which they were supposed to be safe. The anomaly of their sexuality puts them in danger, unexpectedly.
James Baldwin
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The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
James Baldwin
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To hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first... acceptance totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are [;]... the second... that one must never, in one's life, accept... injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one's strength.
James Baldwin
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I'm not interested in anybody's guilt. Guilt is a luxury that we can no longer afford. I know you didn't do it, and I didn't do it either, but I am responsible for it because I am a man and a citizen of this country and you are responsible for it, too, for the very same reason... Anyone who is trying to be conscious must begin to dismiss the vocabulary which we've used so long to cover it up, to lie about the way things are.
James Baldwin
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An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.
James Baldwin
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Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it.
James Baldwin
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It was as though we were a picture, trapped in time: this had been happening for hundreds of years, people sitting in a room, waiting for dinner, and listening to the blues.
James Baldwin
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Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.
James Baldwin
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The determination to outwit one's situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
James Baldwin
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Heavenly witnesses are a tricky lot, to be used by whoever is closest to Heaven at the time. And legend and theology, which are designed to sanctify our fears, crimes, and aspirations, also reveal them for what they are.
James Baldwin
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It is a terrible, an inexorable law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own: in the face of one's victim, one sees oneself.
James Baldwin
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How can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever, live the way they say they do, or the way they say they should?
James Baldwin
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Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
James Baldwin
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The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
James Baldwin
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Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to him from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it's true of everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace.
James Baldwin
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But it was not the room's disorder which was frightening; it was the fact that when one began searching for the key to this disorder, one realized that it was not to be found in any of the usual places. For this was not a matter of habit or circumstance or temperament; it was a matter of punishment and grief.
James Baldwin
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And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.
James Baldwin
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Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
James Baldwin
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But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking on the road; the perspective to say the very least, changes only with the journey; only when the road has, all abruptly and treacherously, and with an absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place.
James Baldwin
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I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read. The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy, and we can dismiss it with the restrained observation that I certainly would not consider living it again.
James Baldwin
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To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
James Baldwin
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It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.
James Baldwin
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Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses.
James Baldwin
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We should certainly know by now that it is one thing to overthrow a dictator or repel an invader and quite another thing really to achieve a revolution. Time and time and time again, the people discover that they have merely betrayed themselves into the hands of yet another Pharaoh who, since he was necessary to put the broken country together, will not let them go.
James Baldwin
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Quote of the day
Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.
Ogden Nash
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:
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life
love
time
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man
negro
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reality
true
american
black
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