Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
JAMES BALDWINThe purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.
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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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The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions.
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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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If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person.
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All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique.
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Literature is indispensable to the world.
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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.
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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.
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For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
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Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.
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People can cry much easier than they can change.
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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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Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
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The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
JAMES BALDWIN