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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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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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The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.
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Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
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Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.
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The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.
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At four o'clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
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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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You took the best, so why not take the rest?
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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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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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Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.
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Artists are here to disturb the peace.
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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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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.
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All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.
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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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You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.
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The past is what makes the present coherent, and the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.
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Sometimes you hear a person speak the truth and you know that they are speaking the truth. But you also know that they have not heard themselves, do not know what they have said: do not know that they have revealed much more than they have said. This may be why the truth remains, on the whole, so rare.
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