To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.
JAMES BALDWINPrecisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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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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It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
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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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People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
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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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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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All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique.
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Youth must be the worst time in anybody’s life.
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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
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If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody
JAMES BALDWIN -
Literature is indispensable to the world.
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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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If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person.
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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.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.
JAMES BALDWIN