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You're getting to be a big boy,' I said desperately, 'it's time you started thinking about your future.' 'I'm thinking about my future,' said Sonny, grimly. 'I think about it all the time.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.
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Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands we have no right to assume otherwise. If we do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.
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The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.
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I started reading. I read everything I could get my hands on...By the time I was thirteen I had read myself out of Harlem. I had read every book in two libraries and had a card for the Forty-Second Street branch.
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A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.
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You've got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.
James A. Baldwin
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There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment the time is always now.
James A. Baldwin
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Writing is a political instrument.
James A. Baldwin
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I don't know, now, when I first looked at Hella and found her stale, found her body uninteresting, her presence grating. It seemed to happen all at once—I suppose that only means that it had been happening for a long time.
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It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
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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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I often wonder what I'd do if there weren't any books in the world.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
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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We are responsible for the world in which we find ourselves, if only because we are the only sentient force which can change it.
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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All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
James A. Baldwin
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Color is not a human or a personal reality it is a political reality.
James A. Baldwin
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No man is a devil in his own mind.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin