People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.
JAMES BALDWINYou 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.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.
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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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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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The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.
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Colour is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.
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There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation.
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We all commit our crimes. The thing is to not lie about them.
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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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Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it.
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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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I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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Hatred is always self hatred, and there is something suicidal about it.
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Everybody’s journey is individual.
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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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The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.
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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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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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The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
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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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Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
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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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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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There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.
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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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Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.
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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.
JAMES BALDWIN