It’s a miracle to realize that somebody loves you.
JAMES BALDWINIt 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.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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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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Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.
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Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it.
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Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
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I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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Education is indoctrination if you’re white – subjugation if you’re black.
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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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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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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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The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.
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American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
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It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.
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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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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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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 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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No man is a devil in his own mind.
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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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I often wonder what I’d do if there weren’t any books in the world.
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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.
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Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.
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Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
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The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
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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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No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
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Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
JAMES BALDWIN