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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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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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Artists are here to disturb the peace.
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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 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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The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.
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Heavenly witnesses are a tricky lot, to be used by whoever is closest to Heaven at the time. And legend and theology, which are designed to sanctify our fears, crimes, and aspirations, also reveal them for what they are.
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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
James A. Baldwin
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I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.
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We can make America what America must become.
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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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It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak.
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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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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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A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
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All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.
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Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
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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.
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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An American Negro, however deep his sympathies, or however bright his rage, ceases to be simply a black man when he faces a black man from Africa.
James A. Baldwin
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The American ideal is, after all, that everyone should be as much alike as possible.
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Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.
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