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The challenge is in the moment the time is always now.

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 purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
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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Not only was I not born to be a slave I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave master.
James A. Baldwin
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If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not.
James A. Baldwin
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Secrets hidden at the heart of midnight are simply waiting to be dragged to the light, as, on some unlucky high noon, they always are. But secrets shrouded in the glare of candor are bound to defeat even the most determined and agile inspector for the light is always changing and proves that the eye cannot be trusted.
James A. Baldwin
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It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak.
James A. Baldwin
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You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world... The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way... people look at reality, then you can change it.
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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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.
James A. Baldwin
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We are very cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are. And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame, and so ugly.
James A. Baldwin
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... every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
James A. Baldwin
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Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
James A. Baldwin
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It is impossible to pretend that you are not heir to, and therefore, however inadequately or unwillingly, responsible to, and for, the time and place that give you life -- without becoming, at very best, a dangerously disoriented human being.
James A. Baldwin
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She was twenty and had come to realize that, though she had a voice, she wasn't a singer that to endure and embrace the life of a singer demands a whole lot more than a voice.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country a hard look at himself, for the greatest achievements must begin somewhere, and they always begin with the person.
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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When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.
James A. Baldwin
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Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
James A. Baldwin
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The impossible is the least that one can demand.
James A. Baldwin