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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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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.
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I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
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One can only face in others what one can face in oneself.
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Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.
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It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
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The world's definitions are one thing and the life one actually lives is quite another. One cannot allow oneself, nor one's family, friends, or lovers - to say nothing of one's children - to live according to the world's definitions: one must find a way, perpetually, to be stronger and better than that.
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It is a very grave matter to be forced to imitate a people for whom you know-which is the price of your performance and survival-you do not exist. It is hard to imitate a people whose existence appears, mainly, to be made tolerable by their bottomless gratitude that they are not, thank heaven, you.
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The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
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There are people in the world for whom coming along is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.
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Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.
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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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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.
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If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.
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An American Negro, however deep his sympathies, or however bright his rage, ceases to be simply a black man when he faces a black man from Africa.
James A. Baldwin