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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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James A. Baldwin
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.
James A. Baldwin
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You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.
James A. Baldwin
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A person does not lightly elect to oppose his society. One would much rather be at home among one's compatriots than be mocked and detested by them. And there is a level on which the mockery of people, even their hatred, is moving, because it is so blind: It is terrible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own destruction.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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... every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
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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It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.
James A. Baldwin
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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
James A. Baldwin
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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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The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.
James A. Baldwin
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People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become, and they pay for it, very simply, by the lives they lead.
James A. Baldwin
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Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
James A. Baldwin
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Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.
James A. Baldwin
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Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
James A. Baldwin
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Those kids aren't dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don't get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.
James A. Baldwin
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Europe has what we [Americans] do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities.
James A. Baldwin
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The challenge is in the moment the time is always now.
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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Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover's war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.
James A. Baldwin