Quote

I was learning the importance of names - having them, making them - but at the same time I sensed the dangers. Recognition was followed by oblivion, a yawning maw whose victims disappeared without a trace.

Josephine Baker

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Josephine Baker
Age: 68 †
Born: 1906
Born: June 3
Died: 1975
Died: April 12
Actor
Dancer
Film Actor
Jazz Musician
Model
Singer
Street Artist
Vedette
St. Louis
Missouri
Freda Josephine McDonald
Joséphine Baker
Without
Recognition
Yawning
Time
Victim
Sensed
Importance
Disappeared
Whose
Dangers
Danger
Trace
Learning
Oblivion
Names
Victims
Making
Followed

More quotes by Josephine Baker

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The secret to the fountain of youth is to think youthful thoughts.
Josephine Baker
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Each time I leaped I seemed to touch the sky and when I regained earth it seemed to be mine alone.
Josephine Baker
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We must change the system of education and instruction. Unfortunately, history has shown us that brotherhood must be learned, when it should be natural.
Josephine Baker
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I ran away from St. Louis, and then I ran away from the United States, because of that terror of discrimination.
Josephine Baker
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The old Catholic parties hounded me with a Christian hatred from station to station, city to city, one stage to another.
Josephine Baker
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I shall dance all my life. . . . I would like to die, breathless, spent, at the end of a dance.
Josephine Baker
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What am I most ashamed of in my life? Not keeping my promise to my sister and being too scared of America to attend her funeral.
Josephine Baker
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I spent 30 minutes each morning rubbing my body with half a lemon to lighten my skin.
Josephine Baker
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All my life, I have maintained that the people of the world can learn to live together in peace if they are not brought up in prejudice.
Josephine Baker
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The white imagination is sure something when it comes to blacks.
Josephine Baker
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He was my cream, and I was his coffee - And when you poured us together, it was something.
Josephine Baker
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...It looked very different from the Statue of Liberty, but what did that matter? What was the good of having the statue without the liberty, the freedom to go where one chose if one was held back by one's color? No, I preferred the Eiffel Tower, which made no promises. ~ Josephine Baker, once she had seen the Eiffel Tower
Josephine Baker
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One day I realized I was living in a country where I was afraid to be black. It was only a country for white people. Not black. So I left. I had been suffocating in the United States... A lot of us left, not because we wanted to leave, but because we couldn't stand it anymore... I felt liberated in Paris.
Josephine Baker
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Art is an elastic sort of love.
Josephine Baker
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The things we truly love stay with us always, locked in our hearts as long as life remains.
Josephine Baker
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One dance had made me the most famous colored woman in the world.
Josephine Baker
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I'm not intimidated by anyone. Everyone is made with two arms, two legs, a stomach and a head. Just think about that.
Josephine Baker
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Surely the day will come when color means nothing more than the skin tone, when religion is seen uniquely as a way to speak one's soul when birth places have the weight of a throw of the dice and all men are born free, when understanding breeds love and brotherhood.
Josephine Baker
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Friends, to me for years St. Louis represented a city of fear... humiliation... misery and terror... A city where in the eyes of the white man a Negro should know his place and had better stay in it.
Josephine Baker
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I believe if the white and colored people could get together and be let alone, they would understand each other and consequently love each other.
Josephine Baker