It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.
JAMES BALDWINI often wonder what I’d do if there weren’t any books in the world.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
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Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
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Youth must be the worst time in anybody’s life.
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People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.
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The impossible is the least that one can demand.
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Perhaps he is a fool or a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.
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The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.
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All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.
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You write in order to change the world, if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.
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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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The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
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No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
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Everybody’s journey is individual.
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The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions.
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You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.
JAMES BALDWIN






