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It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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Words like freedom, justice, democracy are not common concepts on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.
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There are people in the world for whom coming along is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.
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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.
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The determination to outwit one's situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
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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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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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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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Artists are here to disturb the peace.
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It is dangerous to be an American Negro male. America has never wanted its Negroes to be men, and does not, generally, treat them as men. It treats them as mascots, pets, or things.
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I often wonder what I'd do if there weren't any books in the world.
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The trick is to love somebody.... If you love one person, you see everybody else differently.
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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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An American Negro, however deep his sympathies, or however bright his rage, ceases to be simply a black man when he faces a black man from Africa.
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Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.
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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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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
James A. Baldwin
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To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
James A. Baldwin
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The impossible is the least that one can demand.
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It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.
James A. Baldwin