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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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For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
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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.
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I was in his hands, he called me by the thunder at my ear. I was in his hands: I was being changed all that I could do was cling to him. I did not realize, until I realized it, that I was also kissing him, that everything was breaking and changing and turning in me and moving toward him.
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Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.
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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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One can only face in others what one can face in oneself.
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God be thanked for books! They are the voices of the distant and the dead.
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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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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.
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I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read. The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy, and we can dismiss it with the restrained observation that I certainly would not consider living it again.
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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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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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People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.
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Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
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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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White people will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this - which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never - the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.
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He may be a very nice man. But I haven't got the time to figure that out. All I know is, he's got a uniform and a gun and I have to relate to him that way. That's the only way to relate to him because one of us may have to die.
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You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.
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I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
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Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely.
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