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It was as though we were a picture, trapped in time: this had been happening for hundreds of years, people sitting in a room, waiting for dinner, and listening to the blues.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
Waiting
Happenings
Though
Happening
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Dinner
Years
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Time
Sitting
People
Listening
Blues
Room
Trapped
Rooms
Hundreds

More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.
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People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen forget.
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A writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees. No one can tell him about that. No one can control that reality. It reminds me of something Pablo Picasso was supposed to have said to Gertrude Stein while he was painting her portrait. Gertrude said, “I don’t look like that.” And Picasso replied, “You will.” And he was right.
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But, when the chips are down, its better to be furious with someone you love, or frightened for someone you love, than be put through the merciless horror of being ashamed of someone you love.
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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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Experience is a private, very largely speechless affair.
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You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. [and then you discover that others have suffered much more than you and your problems look good in comparison]
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Great art can only be created out of love.
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I often wonder what I'd do if there weren't any books in the world.
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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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There are people in the world for whom coming along is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.
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It seems to be typical of life in America ... that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.
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When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn't a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.
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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.
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The white man discovered the Cross by way of the Bible, but the black man discovered the Bible by way of the Cross.
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Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
James A. Baldwin
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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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If all you want to do is make money, the very last thing you need is imagination.
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People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.
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Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.
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