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.
JAMES BALDWINYou think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.
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People can cry much easier than they can change.
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Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
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Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
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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 can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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Love was a country he knew nothing about.
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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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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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It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
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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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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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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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It’s a miracle to realize that somebody loves you.
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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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People can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.
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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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There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.
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Whoever debases others is debasing himself.
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I often wonder what I’d do if there weren’t any books in the world.
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Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.
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There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation.
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You write in order to change the world, if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.
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The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.
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Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity.
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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.
JAMES BALDWIN