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After departure, only invisible things are left, perhaps the life of the world is held together by invisible chains of memory and loss and love. So many things, so many people, depart! And we can only repossess them in our minds.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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It is said that the camera cannot lie, but rarely do we allow it to do anything else, since the camera sees what you point it at: the camera sees what you want it to see.
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The world's definitions are one thing and the life one actually lives is quite another. One cannot allow oneself, nor one's family, friends, or lovers - to say nothing of one's children - to live according to the world's definitions: one must find a way, perpetually, to be stronger and better than that.
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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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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.
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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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He may be a very nice man. But I haven't got the time to figure that out. All I know is, he's got a uniform and a gun and I have to relate to him that way. That's the only way to relate to him because one of us may have to die.
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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
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You don't need numbers you need passion, and this is proven by the history of the world!
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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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A writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees.
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The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.
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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.
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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.
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It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak.
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