Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
JAMES BALDWINYou 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.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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Literature is indispensable to the world.
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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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Those kids aren’t dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don’t get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.
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There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation.
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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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The impossible is the least that one can demand.
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All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique.
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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.
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The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.
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The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks at reality, then you can change it.
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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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Artists are here to disturb the peace.
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There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.
JAMES BALDWIN -
I often wonder what I’d do if there weren’t any books in the world.
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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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Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
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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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True rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers,and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one’s life.
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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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Guilt is a luxury that we can no longer afford.
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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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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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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
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Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.
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Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
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It is easy to proclaim all souls equal in the sight of God; it is hard to make men equal on earth in the sight of men.
JAMES BALDWIN