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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 A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.
James A. Baldwin
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We are responsible for the world in which we find ourselves, if only because we are the only sentient force which can change it.
James A. Baldwin
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One can only face in others what one can face in oneself.
James A. Baldwin
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Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. 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 A. Baldwin
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Society is held together by our need we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.
James A. Baldwin
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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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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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You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.
James A. Baldwin
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Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.
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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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.
James A. 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 A. Baldwin
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When the South has trouble with its Negroes - when the Negroes refuse to remain in their place - it blames outside agitators and Northern interference. When the nation has trouble with the Northern Negro, it blames the Kremlin.
James A. Baldwin
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Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.
James A. Baldwin
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And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time, and furthermore, to win.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin