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If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you 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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No man is a devil in his own mind.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.
James A. Baldwin
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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
James A. Baldwin
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The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
James A. Baldwin
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It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
James A. Baldwin
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The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through.
James A. Baldwin
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It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak.
James A. Baldwin
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Yr crown has been bought and paid for. All you have to do is put it on yr head
James A. Baldwin
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Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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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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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.
James A. Baldwin
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The greatest significance of the present student generation is that it is through them that the point of view of the subjugated is finally and inexorably being expressed.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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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
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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
James A. Baldwin
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A real writer is always shifting and changing and searching.
James A. Baldwin