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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
Inability
Mark
Emotion
Parading
Feel
Spurious
Feels
Ostentatious
Sentimentality
Dishonesty
Excessive

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People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
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I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
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It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.
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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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The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide.
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The hope of the world lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.
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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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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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I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
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All racists are irresponsible.
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It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
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It is impossible to pretend that you are not heir to, and therefore, however inadequately or unwillingly, responsible to, and for, the time and place that give you life -- without becoming, at very best, a dangerously disoriented human being.
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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.
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You don't need numbers you need passion, and this is proven by the history of the world!
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Great art can only be created out of love.
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I was in his hands, he called me by the thunder at my ear. I was in his hands: I was being changed all that I could do was cling to him. I did not realize, until I realized it, that I was also kissing him, that everything was breaking and changing and turning in me and moving toward him.
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The states of birth, suffering, love, and death, are extreme states: extreme, universal, and inescapable. We all know this, but we would rather not know it. The artist is present to correct the delusions to which we are all prey in our attempts to avoid this knowledge. - James Baldwin, The Creative Process
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Artists are here to disturb the peace.
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One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.
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James Joyce is right about history being a nightmare-- but it may be that nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history in trapped in them.
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