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Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
Mark
Emotion
Parading
Feel
Spurious
Feels
Ostentatious
Sentimentality
Dishonesty
Excessive
Inability

More quotes by 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.
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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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The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
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The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
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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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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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Artists are here to disturb the peace.
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I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
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Employment is my right my destiny.
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It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.
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Great art can only be created out of love.
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You've got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.
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It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak.
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Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.
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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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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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The hope of the world lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.
James A. Baldwin
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Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.
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Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.
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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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