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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
She was twenty and had come to realize that, though she had a voice, she wasn't a singer that to endure and embrace the life of a singer demands a whole lot more than a voice.
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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.
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It is hard for anyone under twenty to realise that death has already assigned them a number, which is going to come up one day.
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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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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.
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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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The impossible is the least that one can demand.
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Writing is a political instrument.
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I don't know, now, when I first looked at Hella and found her stale, found her body uninteresting, her presence grating. It seemed to happen all at once—I suppose that only means that it had been happening for a long time.
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The American ideal is, after all, that everyone should be as much alike as possible.
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I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
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Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.
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Great art can only be created out of love.
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Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.
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Employment is my right my destiny.
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One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.
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One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.
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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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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.
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There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment the time is always now.
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