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But, when the chips are down, its better to be furious with someone you love, or frightened for someone you love, than be put through the merciless horror of being ashamed of someone you love.

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 trick is to love somebody.... If you love one person, you see everybody else differently.
James A. Baldwin
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If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.
James A. Baldwin
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Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they're better than other human beings.
James A. Baldwin
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Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.
James A. Baldwin
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I think that the inability to love is the central problem, because that inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And if you can't be touched, you can't be changed. And if you can't be changed, you can't be alive.
James A. Baldwin
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People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.
James A. Baldwin
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The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.
James A. Baldwin
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I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.
James A. Baldwin
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To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it fears must be faced.
James A. Baldwin
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When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.
James A. Baldwin
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At four o'clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
James A. Baldwin
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A devotion to humanity is... too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause, and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty.
James A. Baldwin
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Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
James A. Baldwin
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The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.
James A. Baldwin
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You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world... The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way... people look at reality, then you can change it.
James A. Baldwin
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It is a very grave matter to be forced to imitate a people for whom you know-which is the price of your performance and survival-you do not exist. It is hard to imitate a people whose existence appears, mainly, to be made tolerable by their bottomless gratitude that they are not, thank heaven, you.
James A. Baldwin
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Somebody, said Jacques, your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour - and in the oddest places! - for the lack of it.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin