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All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.
James A. Baldwin
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An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.
James A. Baldwin
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But, when the chips are down, its better to be furious with someone you love, or frightened for someone you love, than be put through the merciless horror of being ashamed of someone you love.
James A. Baldwin
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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
James A. Baldwin
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Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle.
James A. Baldwin
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The white man discovered the Cross by way of the Bible, but the black man discovered the Bible by way of the Cross.
James A. Baldwin
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Society is held together by our need we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.
James A. Baldwin
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Sometimes you hear a person speak the truth and you know that they are speaking the truth. But you also know that they have not heard themselves, do not know what they have said: do not know that they have revealed much more than they have said. This may be why the truth remains, on the whole, so rare.
James A. Baldwin
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Color is not a human or a personal reality it is a political reality.
James A. Baldwin
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It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.
James A. Baldwin
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Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.
James A. Baldwin
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I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.
James A. Baldwin
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An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger.
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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Art has to be a kind of confession. I don't mean a true confession in the sense of that dreary magazine. The effort it seems to me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover them, too - the terms with which they are connected to other people.
James A. Baldwin
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People don't have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you're dead, when they've killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn't have any character. They weep big, bitter tears - not for you. For themselves, because they've lost their toy.
James A. Baldwin
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Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.
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.
James A. Baldwin
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We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible.
James A. Baldwin
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Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
James A. Baldwin