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To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity
James A. Baldwin
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Society is held together by our need we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.
James A. Baldwin
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It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.
James A. Baldwin
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Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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Life is more important than art that's what makes art important.
James A. Baldwin
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Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word love here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.
James A. Baldwin
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It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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The challenge is in the moment the time is always now.
James A. Baldwin
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Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they're better than other human beings.
James A. Baldwin
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Those kids aren't dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don't get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.
James A. Baldwin
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We are very cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are. And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame, and so ugly.
James A. Baldwin
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And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time, and furthermore, to win.
James A. Baldwin
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Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
James A. Baldwin
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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
James A. Baldwin
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The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
James A. Baldwin