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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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More quotes by James A. Baldwin
Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.
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The determination to outwit one's situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
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The world tends to trap you in the role you play and it is always extremely hard to maintain a watchful, mocking distance between oneself as one appears to be and oneself as one actually is.
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This is the charged, the dangerous moment, when everything must be re-examined, must be made new, when nothing at all can be taken for granted.
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Life is more important than art that's what makes art important.
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Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
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I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.
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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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Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated – in the main, abominably – because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.
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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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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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It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
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The miracle is that some have stepped out of the rags of the Republic's definition to assume the great burden and glory of their humanity and their responsibility for one another. It is an extraordinary achievement to be trapped in the dungeon of color and to dare to shake down its walls and to step out of it leaving the jailkeeper in the rubble.
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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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I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
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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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Employment is my right my destiny.
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