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I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born, in principle, in a society in which they were supposed to be safe. The anomaly of their sexuality puts them in danger, unexpectedly.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.
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The challenge is in the moment the time is always now.
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Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.
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I started reading. I read everything I could get my hands on...By the time I was thirteen I had read myself out of Harlem. I had read every book in two libraries and had a card for the Forty-Second Street branch.
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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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Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
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Because I was raised in a Christian culture I never considered myself to be a totally free human being.
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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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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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What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors. It's astounding to me, for example, that so many people really seem to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free.
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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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The determination to outwit one's situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
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An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger.
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The impossible is the least that one can demand.
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America sometimes resembles, at least from the point of view of a black man, an exceedingly monotonous minstrel show the same dances, same music, same jokes. One has done (or been) the show so long that one can do it in one’s own sleep.
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