People can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.
JAMES BALDWINThere are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.
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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Colour is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.
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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
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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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To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
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It’s a miracle to realize that somebody loves you.
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Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
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Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.
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I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
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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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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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Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.
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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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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.
JAMES BALDWIN