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It is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.
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The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
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Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.
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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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Employment is my right my destiny.
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It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.
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The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.
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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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Youth must be the worst time in anybody's life. Everything's happening for the first time, which means that sorrow, then, lasts forever. Later, you can see that there was something very beautiful in it. That's because you ain't got to go through it no more.
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Writing is a political instrument.
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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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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.
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God be thanked for books! They are the voices of the distant and the dead.
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Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.
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There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.
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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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In order to have a conversation with someone you must reveal yourself.
James A. Baldwin
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I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected - those, precisely, who need the law's protection most! - and listens to their testimony.
James A. Baldwin