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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.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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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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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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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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You took the best, so why not take the rest?
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Yr crown has been bought and paid for. All you have to do is put it on yr head
James A. Baldwin
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Most people... find a disorientating mismatch between the long-term nature of their liabilities and the increasingly short-term nature of their assets.
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Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
James A. Baldwin
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The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.
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I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.
James A. Baldwin
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A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.
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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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We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have a sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be.
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You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.
James A. Baldwin
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When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.
James A. Baldwin
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Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely.
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.
James A. Baldwin
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He may be a very nice man. But I haven't got the time to figure that out. All I know is, he's got a uniform and a gun and I have to relate to him that way. That's the only way to relate to him because one of us may have to die.
James A. Baldwin
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Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.
James A. Baldwin
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If you're afraid to die, you will not be able to live.
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I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read. The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy, and we can dismiss it with the restrained observation that I certainly would not consider living it again.
James A. Baldwin