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There are people in the world for whom coming along is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.

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 American ideal is, after all, that everyone should be as much alike as possible.
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This is the charged, the dangerous moment, when everything must be re-examined, must be made new, when nothing at all can be taken for granted.
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I often wonder what I'd do if there weren't any books in the world.
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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.
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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.
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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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Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.
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The trick is to love somebody.... If you love one person, you see everybody else differently.
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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.
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Experience is a private, very largely speechless affair.
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If you're afraid to die, you will not be able to live.
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We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have a sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be.
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James Joyce is right about history being a nightmare-- but it may be that nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history in trapped in them.
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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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One can only face in others what one can face in oneself.
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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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After departure, only invisible things are left, perhaps the life of the world is held together by invisible chains of memory and loss and love. So many things, so many people, depart! And we can only repossess them in our minds.
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The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.
James A. Baldwin
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It is hard for anyone under twenty to realise that death has already assigned them a number, which is going to come up one day.
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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