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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 is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
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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 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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All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
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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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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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The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.
James A. Baldwin
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If you're afraid to die, you will not be able to live.
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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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Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.
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Women manage, quite brilliantly, on the whole, and to stunning and unforeseeable effect, to survive and surmount being defined by others. They dismiss the definition, however dangerous or wounding it may be-- or even, sometimes, find a way to utilize it.
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Artists are here to disturb the peace.
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Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
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You write in order to change the world.
James A. Baldwin
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Yet I also suspected that what I was seeing was but a part of the truth and perhaps not even the most important part beneath these faces, these clothes, accents, rudenesses, was power and sorrow, both unadmitted, unrealized, the power of inventors, the sorrow of the disconnected.
James A. Baldwin
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A real writer is always shifting and changing and searching.
James A. Baldwin
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You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world... The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way... people look at reality, then you can change it.
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected - those, precisely, who need the law's protection most! - and listens to their testimony.
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The determination to outwit one's situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
James A. Baldwin