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I don't know, now, when I first looked at Hella and found her stale, found her body uninteresting, her presence grating. It seemed to happen all at once—I suppose that only means that it had been happening for a long time.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
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People can cry much easier than they can change.
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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
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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.
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A liberal: someone who thinks he knows more about your experience than you do.
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When human rights are abused on a grand scale, the broth of purity boils and feeds the rebellion of a new order.
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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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For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.
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The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
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If all you want to do is make money, the very last thing you need is imagination.
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The determination to outwit one's situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
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Most people... find a disorientating mismatch between the long-term nature of their liabilities and the increasingly short-term nature of their assets.
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The American ideal is, after all, that everyone should be as much alike as possible.
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I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
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For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
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The states of birth, suffering, love, and death, are extreme states: extreme, universal, and inescapable. We all know this, but we would rather not know it. The artist is present to correct the delusions to which we are all prey in our attempts to avoid this knowledge. - James Baldwin, The Creative Process
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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.
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We are very cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are. And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame, and so ugly.
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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.
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Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.
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