There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.
JAMES BALDWINIt’s a miracle to realize that somebody loves you.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore.
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People can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.
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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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People can cry much easier than they can change.
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There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.
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Hatred is always self hatred, and there is something suicidal about it.
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People don’t have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love.
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Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
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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.
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People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.
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If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.
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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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I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also so much more than that. So are we all.
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There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation.
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The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions.
JAMES BALDWIN






