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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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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.
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At four o'clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
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The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.
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The hope of the world lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.
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Remember, to hate, to be violent, is demeaning. It means you're afraid of the other side of the coin -- to love and be loved.
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Heavenly witnesses are a tricky lot, to be used by whoever is closest to Heaven at the time. And legend and theology, which are designed to sanctify our fears, crimes, and aspirations, also reveal them for what they are.
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God be thanked for books! They are the voices of the distant and the dead.
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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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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.
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The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.
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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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All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.
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I think that the inability to love is the central problem, because that inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And if you can't be touched, you can't be changed. And if you can't be changed, you can't be alive.
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Experience is a private, very largely speechless affair.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
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If you're afraid to die, you will not be able to live.
James A. Baldwin
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Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover's war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.
James A. Baldwin
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You write in order to change the world.
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
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I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
James A. Baldwin