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There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
Things
People
Unnerving
Accumulating
Contempt
Hatred
Silent
Heaven

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If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not.
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The trick is to love somebody.... If you love one person, you see everybody else differently.
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A writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees.
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The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.
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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!
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I was in his hands, he called me by the thunder at my ear. I was in his hands: I was being changed all that I could do was cling to him. I did not realize, until I realized it, that I was also kissing him, that everything was breaking and changing and turning in me and moving toward him.
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All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
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This is the charged, the dangerous moment, when everything must be re-examined, must be made new, when nothing at all can be taken for granted.
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Not only was I not born to be a slave I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave master.
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The states of birth, suffering, love, and death, are extreme states: extreme, universal, and inescapable. We all know this, but we would rather not know it. The artist is present to correct the delusions to which we are all prey in our attempts to avoid this knowledge. - James Baldwin, The Creative Process
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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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You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.
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You took the best, so why not take the rest?
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Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity
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Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.
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Artists are here to disturb the peace.
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It is said that the camera cannot lie, but rarely do we allow it to do anything else, since the camera sees what you point it at: the camera sees what you want it to see.
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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.
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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.
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People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
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