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Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
Sweet
Lasts
Last
Relentlessly
Force
Drop
Experience
Possibly
Give
Bitter
Everything
Forces
Giving
Depends

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Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it.
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And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time, and furthermore, to win.
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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.
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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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People can cry much easier than they can change.
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The world tends to trap you in the role you play and it is always extremely hard to maintain a watchful, mocking distance between oneself as one appears to be and oneself as one actually is.
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The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.
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Remember, to hate, to be violent, is demeaning. It means you're afraid of the other side of the coin -- to love and be loved.
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A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.
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Writing is a political instrument.
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The determination to outwit one's situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
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Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.
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The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.
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To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.
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Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated – in the main, abominably – because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.
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One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.
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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.
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Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
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All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
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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.
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