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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 world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
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.
James A. Baldwin
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One can only face in others what one can face in oneself.
James A. Baldwin
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One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible.
James A. Baldwin
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... every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
James A. Baldwin
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Somebody, said Jacques, your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour - and in the oddest places! - for the lack of it.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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If all you want to do is make money, the very last thing you need is imagination.
James A. Baldwin
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Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
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.
James A. Baldwin
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An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
James A. Baldwin
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Words like freedom, justice, democracy are not common concepts on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.
James A. Baldwin
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You took the best, so why not take the rest?
James A. Baldwin
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Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
James A. Baldwin
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Youth must be the worst time in anybody's life. Everything's happening for the first time, which means that sorrow, then, lasts forever. Later, you can see that there was something very beautiful in it. That's because you ain't got to go through it no more.
James A. Baldwin
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I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.
James A. Baldwin