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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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For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
James A. Baldwin
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People don't have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you're dead, when they've killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn't have any character. They weep big, bitter tears - not for you. For themselves, because they've lost their toy.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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The white man discovered the Cross by way of the Bible, but the black man discovered the Bible by way of the Cross.
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.
James A. Baldwin
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People can cry much easier than they can change.
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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There is something terribly radical about believing that one's own experience and images are important enough to speak about, much less to write about and to perform
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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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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It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own: in the face of one's victim, one sees oneself.
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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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.
James A. Baldwin
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The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
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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Color is not a human or a personal reality it is a political reality.
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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The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide.
James A. Baldwin
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The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin