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I started reading. I read everything I could get my hands on...By the time I was thirteen I had read myself out of Harlem. I had read every book in two libraries and had a card for the Forty-Second Street branch.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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Everything
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.
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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To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
James A. Baldwin
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I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born, in principle, in a society in which they were supposed to be safe. The anomaly of their sexuality puts them in danger, unexpectedly.
James A. Baldwin
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To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
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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No man is a devil in his own mind.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
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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The states of birth, suffering, love, and death, are extreme states: extreme, universal, and inescapable. We all know this, but we would rather not know it. The artist is present to correct the delusions to which we are all prey in our attempts to avoid this knowledge. - James Baldwin, The Creative Process
James A. Baldwin
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You took the best, so why not take the rest?
James A. Baldwin
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White people will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this - which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never - the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.
James A. Baldwin
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The impossible is the least that one can demand.
James A. Baldwin
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When the South has trouble with its Negroes - when the Negroes refuse to remain in their place - it blames outside agitators and Northern interference. When the nation has trouble with the Northern Negro, it blames the Kremlin.
James A. Baldwin
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The past is what makes the present coherent, and the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.
James A. Baldwin
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There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that *they* must accept *you*. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
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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If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.
James A. Baldwin