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The American ideal is, after all, that everyone should be as much alike as possible.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it.
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Experience is a private, very largely speechless affair.
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To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.
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The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
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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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If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.
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In order for this to happen, your entire frame of reference will have to change, and you will be forced to surrender many things that you now scarcely know you have.
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Each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other - male in female, female in male, white in black, and black in white. We are part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.
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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.
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I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.
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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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Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle.
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Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
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Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.
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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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Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.
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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.
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There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.
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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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