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The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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The white man discovered the Cross by way of the Bible, but the black man discovered the Bible by way of the Cross.
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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 hope of the world lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.
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Youth must be the worst time in anybody's life. Everything's happening for the first time, which means that sorrow, then, lasts forever. Later, you can see that there was something very beautiful in it. That's because you ain't got to go through it no more.
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The impossible is the least that one can demand.
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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.
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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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The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.
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The determination to outwit one's situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
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A writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees.
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You write in order to change the world.
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In order to have a conversation with someone you must reveal yourself.
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Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always be seen as untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of Success.
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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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Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it.
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Most people... find a disorientating mismatch between the long-term nature of their liabilities and the increasingly short-term nature of their assets.
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It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.
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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.
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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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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
James A. Baldwin