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Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
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There is a 'sanctity' involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
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But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.
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One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.
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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 A. Baldwin
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Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
James A. Baldwin
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I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.
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The states of birth, suffering, love, and death, are extreme states: extreme, universal, and inescapable. We all know this, but we would rather not know it. The artist is present to correct the delusions to which we are all prey in our attempts to avoid this knowledge. - James Baldwin, The Creative Process
James A. Baldwin
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There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.
James A. Baldwin
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One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.
James A. Baldwin
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It is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important.
James A. Baldwin
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A person does not lightly elect to oppose his society. One would much rather be at home among one's compatriots than be mocked and detested by them. And there is a level on which the mockery of people, even their hatred, is moving, because it is so blind: It is terrible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own destruction.
James A. Baldwin
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We are very cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are. And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame, and so ugly.
James A. Baldwin
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I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.
James A. Baldwin
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Employment is my right my destiny.
James A. 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.
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It is hard for anyone under twenty to realise that death has already assigned them a number, which is going to come up one day.
James A. Baldwin
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The impossible is the least that one can demand.
James A. Baldwin
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I was in his hands, he called me by the thunder at my ear. I was in his hands: I was being changed all that I could do was cling to him. I did not realize, until I realized it, that I was also kissing him, that everything was breaking and changing and turning in me and moving toward him.
James A. Baldwin