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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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James A. Baldwin
Society
Artist
Nothing
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Stable
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Assuming
Heaven

More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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Experience is a private, very largely speechless affair.
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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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The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.
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For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.
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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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At four o'clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
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You took the best, so why not take the rest?
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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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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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Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it.
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I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read. The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy, and we can dismiss it with the restrained observation that I certainly would not consider living it again.
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It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
James A. Baldwin
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Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
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Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.
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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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A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
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Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle.
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There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.
James A. Baldwin
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The miracle is that some have stepped out of the rags of the Republic's definition to assume the great burden and glory of their humanity and their responsibility for one another. It is an extraordinary achievement to be trapped in the dungeon of color and to dare to shake down its walls and to step out of it leaving the jailkeeper in the rubble.
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God be thanked for books! They are the voices of the distant and the dead.
James A. Baldwin