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The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
Lines
Living
Siberian
Ends
Banishment
Young
Siberia
Think
Hide
Thinking
Tend
Failure
Line

More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
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A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.
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An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger.
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It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
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Those kids aren't dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don't get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.
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James Joyce is right about history being a nightmare-- but it may be that nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history in trapped in them.
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Writing is a political instrument.
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Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.
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Life is more important than art that's what makes art important.
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There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that *they* must accept *you*. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love.
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Experience is a private, very largely speechless affair.
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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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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
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What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors. It's astounding to me, for example, that so many people really seem to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free.
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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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It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.
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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.
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I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born, in principle, in a society in which they were supposed to be safe. The anomaly of their sexuality puts them in danger, unexpectedly.
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I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.
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And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time, and furthermore, to win.
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