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Heavenly witnesses are a tricky lot, to be used by whoever is closest to Heaven at the time. And legend and theology, which are designed to sanctify our fears, crimes, and aspirations, also reveal them for what they are.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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We are very cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are. And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame, and so ugly.
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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.
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An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger.
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Words like freedom, justice, democracy are not common concepts on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.
James A. Baldwin
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Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.
James A. Baldwin
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People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.
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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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To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
James A. Baldwin
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Secrets hidden at the heart of midnight are simply waiting to be dragged to the light, as, on some unlucky high noon, they always are. But secrets shrouded in the glare of candor are bound to defeat even the most determined and agile inspector for the light is always changing and proves that the eye cannot be trusted.
James A. Baldwin
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Writing is a political instrument.
James A. Baldwin
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There is something terribly radical about believing that one's own experience and images are important enough to speak about, much less to write about and to perform
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To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.
James A. Baldwin
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Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
James A. Baldwin
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It is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important.
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There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.
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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People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become, and they pay for it, very simply, by the lives they lead.
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The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
James A. Baldwin
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A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.
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It is impossible to pretend that you are not heir to, and therefore, however inadequately or unwillingly, responsible to, and for, the time and place that give you life -- without becoming, at very best, a dangerously disoriented human being.
James A. Baldwin