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After my best friend jumped off the bridge, I knew that I was next. So-Paris. With forty dollars and a one-way ticket.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.
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A liberal: someone who thinks he knows more about your experience than you do.
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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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Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
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Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it.
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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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People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen forget.
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Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.
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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
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All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.
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But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.
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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.
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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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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.
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Employment is my right my destiny.
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Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.
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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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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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