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In order for this to happen, your entire frame of reference will have to change, and you will be forced to surrender many things that you now scarcely know you have.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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You took the best, so why not take the rest?
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But, when the chips are down, its better to be furious with someone you love, or frightened for someone you love, than be put through the merciless horror of being ashamed of someone you love.
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The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through.
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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.
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Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle.
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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.
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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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It seems to be typical of life in America ... that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.
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There was no room in God's army for the coward heart, no crown awaiting him who put mother or father, sister or brother, sweetheart or friend above God's will. Let the church cry amen to this!
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One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.
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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.
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Not only was I not born to be a slave I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave master.
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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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Artists are here to disturb the peace.
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The hope of the world lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.
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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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The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.
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At four o'clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
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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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Yet I also suspected that what I was seeing was but a part of the truth and perhaps not even the most important part beneath these faces, these clothes, accents, rudenesses, was power and sorrow, both unadmitted, unrealized, the power of inventors, the sorrow of the disconnected.
James A. Baldwin