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All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.

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 miracle is that some have stepped out of the rags of the Republic's definition to assume the great burden and glory of their humanity and their responsibility for one another. It is an extraordinary achievement to be trapped in the dungeon of color and to dare to shake down its walls and to step out of it leaving the jailkeeper in the rubble.
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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Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely.
James A. Baldwin
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... every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
James A. Baldwin
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She was twenty and had come to realize that, though she had a voice, she wasn't a singer that to endure and embrace the life of a singer demands a whole lot more than a voice.
James A. Baldwin
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Passion is not friendly. It is arrogant, superbly contemptuous of all that is not itself, and, as they very definition of passion implies the impulse to freedom, it has a might intimidiating power. It contains a challenge. It contains an unspeakable hope.
James A. Baldwin
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If all you want to do is make money, the very last thing you need is imagination.
James A. Baldwin
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The challenge is in the moment the time is always now.
James A. Baldwin
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But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.
James A. Baldwin
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A liberal: someone who thinks he knows more about your experience than you do.
James A. Baldwin
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People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen forget.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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I started reading. I read everything I could get my hands on...By the time I was thirteen I had read myself out of Harlem. I had read every book in two libraries and had a card for the Forty-Second Street branch.
James A. Baldwin
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I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read. The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy, and we can dismiss it with the restrained observation that I certainly would not consider living it again.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
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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The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
James A. Baldwin
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There was no room in God's army for the coward heart, no crown awaiting him who put mother or father, sister or brother, sweetheart or friend above God's will. Let the church cry amen to this!
James A. Baldwin