People can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.
JAMES BALDWINMost of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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When you’re writing you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know.
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Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves 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’s a miracle to realize that somebody loves you.
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If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person.
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I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
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All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique.
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The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks at reality, then you can change it.
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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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Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.
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Literature is indispensable to the world.
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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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For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
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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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American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
JAMES BALDWIN