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There is something terribly radical about believing that one's own experience and images are important enough to speak about, much less to write about and to perform

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
Speak
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To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
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Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.
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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
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I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
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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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The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.
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If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.
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The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.
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Experience is a private, very largely speechless affair.
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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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The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
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The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
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But it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening it was the fact that when one began searching for the key to this disorder, one realized that it was not to be found in any of the usual places. For this was not a matter of habit or circumstance or temperament it was a matter of punishment and grief.
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The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through.
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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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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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Life is more important than art that's what makes art important.
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God be thanked for books! They are the voices of the distant and the dead.
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The American ideal is, after all, that everyone should be as much alike as possible.
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You're getting to be a big boy,' I said desperately, 'it's time you started thinking about your future.' 'I'm thinking about my future,' said Sonny, grimly. 'I think about it all the time.
James A. Baldwin