Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore.
JAMES BALDWINAny 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.
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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I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
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There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation.
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You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason.
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All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique.
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I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
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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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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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It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
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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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It is easy to proclaim all souls equal in the sight of God; it is hard to make men equal on earth in the sight of men.
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Hatred is always self hatred, and there is something suicidal about it.
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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.
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For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
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Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
JAMES BALDWIN