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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.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.
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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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The trick is to love somebody.... If you love one person, you see everybody else differently.
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There are people in the world for whom coming along is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.
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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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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.
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There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment the time is always now.
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If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.
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There is a 'sanctity' involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
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I prefer sinners and madmen, who can learn, who can change, who can teach-or people like myself, if I may say so, who are not afraid to eat a lobster alone as they take on their shoulders the monumental weight of thirty years
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The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.
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The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.
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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.
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The impossible is the least that one can demand.
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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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I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born, in principle, in a society in which they were supposed to be safe. The anomaly of their sexuality puts them in danger, unexpectedly.
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The greatest significance of the present student generation is that it is through them that the point of view of the subjugated is finally and inexorably being expressed.
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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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