To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.
JAMES BALDWINWhen you’re writing you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.
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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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American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
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There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.
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Artists are here to disturb the peace.
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Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.
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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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It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
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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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Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it.
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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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Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.
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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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Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
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Love was a country he knew nothing about.
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The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
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Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
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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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For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
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People don’t have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love.
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Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.
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Hatred is always self hatred, and there is something suicidal about it.
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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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Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
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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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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
JAMES BALDWIN