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People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become, and they pay for it, very simply, by the lives they lead.
James Baldwin
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Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore
James Baldwin
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The celebrity never sees himself. I have some idea what I'm doing on that stage; above all, I have some idea what sustains me on that stage. But the celebrity is not exactly Jimmy, though he comes out of Jimmy and Jimmy nourishes that, too. I can see now, with hindsight, that I would've had to become a celebrity in order to survive. A boy like me with all his handicaps, real and fancied, could not have survived in obscurity. I can say that it would have had to happen this way, though I could not see it coming.
James Baldwin
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We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.
James Baldwin
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Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country a hard look at himself, for the greatest achievements must begin somewhere, and they always begin with the person.
James Baldwin
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Rage can only with difficulty, and never entirely, be brought under the domination of the intelligence and is therefore not susceptible to any arguments whatever.
James Baldwin
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The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
James Baldwin
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It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.
James Baldwin
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If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving. And, after all, one can give freedom only be setting someone free.
James Baldwin
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There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.
James Baldwin
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Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty...the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent humanity, the mark of cruelty.
James Baldwin
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You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.
James Baldwin
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It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. And I am not being frivolous here, either. Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become.
James Baldwin
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Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.
James Baldwin
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I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.
James Baldwin
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Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
James Baldwin
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It is said that the camera cannot lie, but rarely do we allow it to do anything else, since the camera sees what you point it at: the camera sees what you want it to see.
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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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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Boy, ain't it time you was thinking about your soul?
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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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 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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It seems to be typical of life in America... that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.
James Baldwin
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At bottom, to be colored means that one has been caught in some utterly unbelievable cosmic joke, a joke so hideous and in such bad taste that it defeats all categories and definitions.
James Baldwin
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Quote of the day
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
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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