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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]

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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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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Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
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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.
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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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You took the best, so why not take the rest?
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I prefer sinners and madmen, who can learn, who can change, who can teach-or people like myself, if I may say so, who are not afraid to eat a lobster alone as they take on their shoulders the monumental weight of thirty years
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The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.
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All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.
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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.
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Yr crown has been bought and paid for. All you have to do is put it on yr head
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I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.
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People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become, and they pay for it, very simply, by the lives they lead.
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Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
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There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that *they* must accept *you*. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love.
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Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
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White people will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this - which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never - the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.
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The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.
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The challenge is in the moment the time is always now.
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It is said that the camera cannot lie, but rarely do we allow it to do anything else, since the camera sees what you point it at: the camera sees what you want it to see.
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The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through.
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