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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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The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.
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Youth must be the worst time in anybody's life. Everything's happening for the first time, which means that sorrow, then, lasts forever. Later, you can see that there was something very beautiful in it. That's because you ain't got to go through it no more.
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One can only face in others what one can face in oneself.
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It is hard for anyone under twenty to realise that death has already assigned them a number, which is going to come up one day.
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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
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Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
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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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We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have a sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be.
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It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.
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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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There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.
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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.
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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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We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible.
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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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Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated – in the main, abominably – because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.
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There is a 'sanctity' involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
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The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass and trees, but other people, has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can. And if one despairs-- as who has not?-- of human love, God's love alone is left.
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If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected - those, precisely, who need the law's protection most! - and listens to their testimony.
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And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time, and furthermore, to win.
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