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The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
Power
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Men
Whenever
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Somebody, said Jacques, your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour - and in the oddest places! - for the lack of it.
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Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.
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You've got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.
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I prefer sinners and madmen, who can learn, who can change, who can teach-or people like myself, if I may say so, who are not afraid to eat a lobster alone as they take on their shoulders the monumental weight of thirty years
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The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.
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A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.
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He may be a very nice man. But I haven't got the time to figure that out. All I know is, he's got a uniform and a gun and I have to relate to him that way. That's the only way to relate to him because one of us may have to die.
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Experience is a private, very largely speechless affair.
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If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.
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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.
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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
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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.
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America sometimes resembles, at least from the point of view of a black man, an exceedingly monotonous minstrel show the same dances, same music, same jokes. One has done (or been) the show so long that one can do it in one’s own sleep.
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Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
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You're getting to be a big boy,' I said desperately, 'it's time you started thinking about your future.' 'I'm thinking about my future,' said Sonny, grimly. 'I think about it all the time.
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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
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Because I was raised in a Christian culture I never considered myself to be a totally free human being.
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The world tends to trap you in the role you play and it is always extremely hard to maintain a watchful, mocking distance between oneself as one appears to be and oneself as one actually is.
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Each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other - male in female, female in male, white in black, and black in white. We are part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.
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