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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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James A. Baldwin
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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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Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it.
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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.
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Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely.
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The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
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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.
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It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.
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Yr crown has been bought and paid for. All you have to do is put it on yr head
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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
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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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If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.
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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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Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.
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One can only face in others what one can face in oneself.
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No man is a devil in his own mind.
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I prefer sinners and madmen, who can learn, who can change, who can teach-or people like myself, if I may say so, who are not afraid to eat a lobster alone as they take on their shoulders the monumental weight of thirty years
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After my best friend jumped off the bridge, I knew that I was next. So-Paris. With forty dollars and a one-way ticket.
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For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
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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.
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Each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other - male in female, female in male, white in black, and black in white. We are part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.
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