You 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.
JAMES BALDWINNakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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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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The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
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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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We all commit our crimes. The thing is to not lie about them.
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Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.
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History is not a procession of illustrious people. It’s about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.
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Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
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Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark.
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Hatred is always self hatred, and there is something suicidal about it.
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Love brought you here. If you trusted love this far, don’t panic now.
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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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People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
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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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American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
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For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for what they become.
JAMES BALDWIN