Love brought you here. If you trusted love this far, don’t panic now.
JAMES BALDWINIf you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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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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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
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We all commit our crimes. The thing is to not lie about them.
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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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Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
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The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.
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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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The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
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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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The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions.
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Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.
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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 are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.
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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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I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.
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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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People can cry much easier than they can change.
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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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I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
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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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Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.
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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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People can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.
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Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
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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.
JAMES BALDWIN